VOL XIX, No 3 [Winter, 1993]

What a Cliché!

David Galef, University of Mississippi

The small girl straggles from the museum to the school bus. Everyone else has already boarded and is waiting impatiently. “Well,” claims the little girl proudly, “last but not lost. At least that’s what my mother always says.” Fifty other schoolchildren hear and nod.

That is how a clashing cliché gets started, or at any rate that is the explanatory scenario I dreamed up. Like someone who hears a pun and then searches for a story to use it as a punch line, over the years I have collected mangled metaphors, battered idioms, and twisted expressions, always looking for explanations behind the novel usage. Some of this may have to do with my chosen profession, which involves poring over student essays. But I also hear full-grown adults, clearly native speakers, talk that way. At the risk of opening up a whole can of beans, let me proceed.

The first category of altered expressions resembles malapropism in all its unintentional oddysey. Perhaps the simplest explanation for many of these missed idioms is mis-hearing, as in You can’t pull the wool over my ice. Since people rarely bother to think about the meaning behind a figurative expression, anything that sounds right will foot the bill. In this realm are several undisputed classics: cutting off your nose despite your face is quite popular, as is the gloomy reflection It’s a doggy-dog world. Other highly ranked candidates are taken for granite and empiric victory. It is worth noting that some of these were first heard from the radio character Falstaff Openshaw on Fred Allen’s imaginary Allen’s Alley, where they were used for all intensive purposes.

Usually these errors sound simple-minded; many are merely careless. Give him a wide birth, for instance, may have been just a spelling error on a student’s paper I was reading. But in slovenliness sleeps the sound of new sayings. He wants to go out and wipe the world, for instance, has an idiosyncratic rightness, bespeaking not a powerful conqueror but a great reformer. These newly created meanings are what make these expressions more than mere mistakes, even if at times they bring one upshore. I treasure the sage advice in Savor the best for last and The victor is spoiled. And worshipers of satin, even if it is just a typographical slip, describes a class of people I know all too well. Occasionally, these eras occur on a rather high level of sophistication, such as engaging in self-flatulation.

A more complex category is the conflation of two expressions. The first time I stumbled across this phenomenon, I was discussing an agenda with a middle-aged business executive. We got to item three. “Hmm…” he mused. “I’ll have to touch bases with you on that one tomorrow.” Only after I replayed his sentence in my mind did I realize that it was a splice of to touch base and I’ll get back to you. Since then, that hybrid has become so prevalent that it hardly sounds peculiar at all.

In fact, that kind of error crops up—or creeps up—frequently, especially with two expressions using the same locution or image. John Ferguson, writing some seven years ago in VERBATIM [XI, 4], termed them Bunnyisms after Bunny, the wife of film director Norman McLeod and an egregious example to us all. Telling me a thing one day and out the other is one of hers. Figures like Gracie Allen on Burns and Allen, as well as Jane Ace, known as “radio’s mistress of misinformation” on The Easy Aces, simply turned that kind of locution into a routine in the 1930s.

Unfortunately, that kind of routine has become unconscious error with many; in other words, routine. Consequently, a politician will paint a portrait of an administration both incompetent and corrupt: The left hand doesn’t know how to wash the right. His opponent, on the third hand, might speak disparagingly of proposed reforms that he regards as trite yet dangerous: old worms in new cans. Other attempts may be simply off—the bad end of the stick of life, there’s no dog like an old dog—or inspired: That throws a wrench into your soup, doesn’t it?, I once heard a math professor tell a colleague. There may even be instances where two clichés trade half their similes. The trouper’s get your ass together. and the trouper’s get your ass in gear are often confused as get your act in gear and get your ass together. The other day I heard someone described as deaf as a bat, and now, like a man waiting for the other shoe to drop in the room above his, I listen for blind as a post.

Figurative accuracy seems to have gone to the hogs; is figurative language itself on the decline? It is certainly not encouraged in places like The New York Times, also known as the gray lady of journalism, but neither does the Times often mix metaphors. Politicians often do, as they strive for an image the American public can embrace. In fact, one of these homemades recently made national headlines, as Jesse Jackson protested that the candidates on the Democratic ticket were cut from the same stripes. That is a clear conflation of cut from the same cloth and of the same stripe—what one of my students once called a slip at the wheel.

Here is another attempt at explanation: in a culture that has deserted basic agriculture for industry, where professions such as shoemaker and blacksmith and cooper have all but disappeared, many people never learn the connections between mankind and nature, or the crafts of working with basic materials. Since so many colorful expressions depend on these vanished relationships, uncertainty rules the roast. A girl describes her boyfriend as a tough nut to catch; a waitress tells me approvingly as she pours my cup of morning coffee, The busy bee catches the worm. Yet modern technology also baffles our culture, which tends to confuse input with feedback as a metaphor for soliciting opinion. Maybe the problem, as Anonymous has stated, is people.

Then there are the image-switches and intensifications. Go ahead, break my arm, says a persuasible type. She bit off her nose to spite her face adds a contortionist twist to an already harsh metaphor. Jane Ace once complained on the air, I’ve been working my head to the bone. Getting the inside skinny, as a reporter in Time recently put it, is equally grotesque—a sight for sick eyes, as a neighbor’s child once said. Here the trend seems to be toward deepening an image already present or shifting to a more emphatic expression. One time-honored way of doing this, of course, is to insert sexual and scatological terms. Don’t crap on my parade! shouts a student activist in my earshot, decrying defecation instead of precipitation. The reductio ad absurdum of this move is the common declarative Fuck that shit!, where an all-purpose verb and an all-inclusive noun stand in for all manner of once-current idioms, including the hell with. An early instance of this change, when the shit hits the fan, is by now so ingrained in the public lexicon that few recall the original expression, when the smoke hits the fan. In an attempt to reverse this trend, a Southern friend of mine offers the alternate when the grits hit the pan, but this usage seems destined to remain a regionalism at best, the kind of Southernism collected by John H. Felts in “Bumps, Grinds, and Other Lewd (1389) Gestures” [XVI,3].

Sometimes the shift can be quite subtle, as in Don’t throw all your eggs into one basket, even though the simple verb-substitution renders the advice devastating to anyone but an omelet-maker. Sometimes the shift comes about through the omission of a word: in a recollection entitled “Master Malaprop” [VII,2], James Higgins describes a newspaper editor who made such proclamations as A hand in the bush is worth two. Along a similar vane, a hardware clerk once told me that the brackets I needed were scarce as hens. In truth, cutting or adding words may occasionally result in an expression more felicitous than the original. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, eminently quotable, is attributed to Samuel Johnson only as Hell is paved with good intentions. Play it again, Sam sounds better than the actual line from Casablanca, Play it, Sam, and Congreve’s Music has charms to soothe a savage breast was long ago altered to soothe the savage beast.

Euphony beats logic. Or, as one of these idioms might put it: take care of the sound, and the sense will take care of itself. At times, the image shifts entirely through what Freud called klang associations, or sheer phonic similarity. Yet Don’t bite the man that feeds you makes satisfactory sense; so does It takes two to tangle. I do not quite agree with the sense underlying a tough road to hoe and his head sank to his boots, but I assume they occasion no discomfort on the part of the speaker. After all, that is the way many people are taught.

The last group falls into what I call prepositional trouble, as in That one threw me over the deep end. Like some of the phrases in other categories, several have become so common as to have ousted the original diction. I cannot count how many times I have heard of someone walking out of the door, the laws of physics notwithstanding. A close second is the request not to hold it up against me—does this refer to a grudge or the fitting of a suit? A similar corruption is hanging into his every word: rapt attention or verbal grappling? Admittedly, preposition usage is not always clearly defined: does one compare apples to oranges, or apples with oranges, or just stick in an and? Also, certain prepositional phrases, such as waiting on a friend, probably qualify as regional usage. As a student of mine once remarked, I suppose it is all part of the wonder about being alive.

Let us open the drawer of conclusions. First of all, I do not mean to impugn non-native speakers, valiantly trying to master a language that often is not even sure of itself. Rather, the so-called unerringness of native speech is in part hit or myth. As Lysander Kemp reminded us in “Mrs. Malaprop in Mexico” [XV,4], other tongues have their slips, as well. “All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses,” wrote William Empson. Some metaphors simply suffer a sea change. If language is a continual exercise in combination and permutation, it makes sense that such expressions, or lusus linguae, will always be with us. They may even infect otherwise straightforward VERBATIM prose, as alert readers will have spotted. In any event, I am keeping my ears peeled. It’s never too late to mend, overheard the other day—is that a combination of It’s never too late to learn and First ended, soonest mended? When will someone within earshot confuse swear by and swear at?

Ah, it is a wise fool that knows his own mother tongue.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“It’s turned out to be one of those red herrings around our necks.” [Quote from Bob Porter, director of Maintenance and Engineering Services in Fontana, California, in the San Bernardino Sun, 26 April 1988. Submitted by J.B. Lawrence, San Bernardino.]

Rhyme and Punishment

Sir Randolph Quirk, University College London

In 1781, it was claimed in the Gentleman’s Magazine that “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket,” so who dares to deny that puns are so called because they are punishable?

Yet despite the hearer’s conventional groan and the perpetrator’s equally conventional apology, everyone knows that verbal play gives a great deal of pleasure, justifying the great deal of ingenuity that goes into producing it. Writers plainly value being able to use words in ways that not only fail to reflect their dictionary meaning but seem flatly to reject it. In an article a couple of years ago, Jan Morris refers to professional writers as “those of us who live by the sweat of our ink.” Quite apart from the fact that the association of writing with ink has decreasing literal validity, there is not much metaphorical sense to be made here either, if we take the remark word by word. Ink does not sweat, we do not sweat ink, and even the traditional fingers clutching traditional ink-filled pens were less likely to be troubled by sweat than by chilly cramp. In fact, of course, we understand Jan Morris with no difficulty because she knew that we would take the whole sequence, “live by the sweat of our ink” (new to us), and map it on to a similar one that was familiar to us. The similarity (in structure, rhythm, wording, etc.) is doubly important. It supplies the stimulus to make the comparison, and it hints that the degree of mismatch will be the clue to the meaning. In consequence, because the familiar “live by the sweat of our brows” means “work hard for a living” (no longer entailing the sort of physical effort that cause sweating), we are prepared to conclude that the Jan Morris clone means “work hard for a living by authorship.”

And maybe that is all it is meant to mean. But when Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1553) speaks of “travail and toil with the sweat of his brows,” we can be sure that he is referring to Adam’s expulsion from Eden and the beginning of toil for everyone (though Genesis III.19 in the Authorized Version follows Coverdale in using the words “sweat of thy face”). So Jan Morris’s readers are free, perhaps encouraged, to think of a writer’s labors in mythic, cosmic terms as part of post-Edenic compulsion.

Such convolutions of phrasal meaning (an aspect of what some call intertextuality) is a common rhetorical device, especially perhaps at the arty end of journalism. In The Independent of 8 September 1990, the same page contained not only the Jan Morris article but a review entitled “Duty and the Beast,” another in which the author lambastes a historian who “has left unread those things he ought to have read, so there can be little trust in him,” and yet another in which Anthony Quinn writes about “the gripes of Roth.”

The rhyme-triggered evocation of the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” even about a book on the “tinsel town” of Hollywood, is not very rewarding, and it seems just about as pointless to be led to the General Confession in the Anglican prayer book to evaluate a biography of Himmler. The punning by Anthony Quinn is a different matter. He is reviewing Philip Roth’s Deception which contrasts London, and an anti-semitism in which Jews seem to connive, with New York, characterized by “Jews with force … full of anger.” The contrast is strong enough to sustain the allusion to Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn (bypassing Steinbeck, of course) when Quinn speaks of the narrative “trampling over the now familiar gripes of Roth.” The contrast also justifies the neat allusion to London whose Cockney vowels responsibly transmute “the grapes of wrath” and enrich our reflections.

Such intertextual references, whether or not pointed by rhyme, puns, and rhythmic matching, must indeed provide depth and enrichment if they are not to become merely a stylistic cliché of the scribbling classes (as they show every sign of doing anyway). Two years on and the same daily paper: The Independent’s arts pages in May 1992 yielded the following (among numerous others) over a period of three days:

It’s in the jeans … concerning the apparently genetic consistency of the Levi Strauss product over 140 years.

Pause and effect … on the relation between Sinatra’s careful timing and his continuing success with audiences.

Ceci n’est pas une critique … a measured assessment of a Magritte exhibition in London.

Top hat and tales … about pop-star Slash and combining his oral memoirs with his penchant for fancy headwear.

Making tracks for Elgar … relating a renewed interest in the composer to an account of how his early recordings were made.

Hit and myth … about a successful recording of Gluck’s Orfeo.

Desert island risks … a sneer at pulpy romance and record programmes but with some admiration for last century’s explorers in tropical waters. (The reference is to a long-running BBC radio interview program, Desert Island Discs.)

There is of course a very long history of such textual duplication whereby meaning is simultaneously compressed and extended. Dramatists and novelists have been especially keen to provide their works with titles that are Janus-faced. For Whom the Bell Tolls enabled Hemingway to look forward into Civil War tragedy as well as back into Donne’s Devotions. In this instance, indeed, the impact of the novel was so great that any reference to the quotation for the past half century could not help evoking both the Hemingway story and the Donne passage—which was thereby given an entirely fresh currency.

There were striking instances of such multiple intertextuality in late 1990. One occasion was the centenary of Manet’s painting “Olympia,” and The Independent (where else need I turn for material?) ran an article on how the picture’s critical reception had changed from rejection by a scandalized France in 1890 to enthusiastic acclaim by an admiring world in 1990. The piece bore the title “The Lady’s Not for Spurning,” with the reasonably obvious meaning ‘The subject of this painting is not to be spurned as a disreputable whore (but enjoyed as a sensitive portrayal).’ Reasonably obvious, I say, though we are helped if we recall that among Christopher Fry’s other norm-defying titles (A Yard of Sun, Thor with Angels, A Sleep of Prisoners) there was The Lady’s Not for Burning, 1949. This enforces a passive interpretation of archaic or rustic flavor— though it appears to be neither a quotation nor a truly historical echo from the wretched time when women could suffer death at the stake for witchcraft. All the more remarkable, then, that the article on Manet has a title that exactly matches Fry’s in rhythm, rhyme, and grammar, the match extending to the curious use of lady to denote in the one a medieval wench thought to be a witch and in the other a French nude of dubious virtue.

But the title could not be read in 1990 without evoking another text and another lady. A decade earlier, the British government led by Margaret Thatcher was facing severe economic troubles and insistent calls for a change of policy to deal with them. There was much talk of whether or not the Prime Minister would do a “U-turn,” but at the annual conference of her party in October 1980 she stoutly rejected any such suggestion. In a rousing speech, she delighted her audience with a particularly rousing sentence: “You turn if you want: the lady’s not for turning.”

This is textually interesting in a number of ways. It is calqued upon the title of a play that few of the audience would have seen or read (significantly no doubt the drafting of the speech seems to have involved Ronald Miller, himself a dramatist). The lexical match requires the speaker to refer to herself in the third person, while ingeniously seizing the opportunity—a further intertextuality—to hint at her Moscow-inspired sobriquet, “the Iron Lady.” But although the sequence achieves near perfection in prosodic matching, the grammar is hardly Fry’s: turning is more plausibly active than passive, with for in its familiar support-oriented role, ‘in favor of.’

There followed numerous recyclings of this sentence with an intertextual reference that was less and less to the Fry play and more and more to the occasion of the conference speech. Ten years later, when Mrs. Thatcher returned from the Rome meeting of European Community leaders, opponents accused her of stubbornly refusing to heed political trends and a change in British public opinion. The Independent on 30 October 1990 summed up this view with the headline, “The lady’s not for learning.” An even plainer link with the 1980 conference came in a prominent announcement by Sky News in June 1991, months after her resignation, that Mrs. Thatcher was to appear in a major interview with David Frost, and—proclaimed the TV ad—“The lady’s not for turning off.”

A final twist. Miles Kington’s column on 23 July 1992 poked fun at the former Prime Minister’s current interest in a tobacco firm and suggested possible slogans for advertising a Thatcher cigarette. They included “Who would want to put a Thatcher out?” and “The lady’s for burning.”

English Loanwords in Chinese

Waiju Zhu, Harbin University of Science and Technology

The spread of English words into other languages is a process that goes on daily. This report details some older and some more recent adoptions of English words into Chinese.

The British empire’s cannon and opium plus the United State’s open-door policy forced open the Qing Dynasty’s feudal gate. With the arrival of foreigners and foreign goods, English words began to spread first in port cities such as Guanzhou (Canton) and Shanghai. Some English words have entered these dialects, the phonetic translation sometimes being very homophonous, sometimes not. The Cantonese called:

cent xian

check chi

quarter gu

fashion hua chen

stamp shi dan

taxi di shi

In Shanghai, the Chinese called:

stick si di ke

gas ga s i

cement shui men ding

chocolate zhu gu li

telephone de lu feng

When western ideas of democracy and liberty were imported into Chinese in some literature, relevant English words were borrowed, for example:

romantic luo man ti ke

inspiration yian shi pi li cun

democracy de me ke xi

humour yu me

international ing te nai xang na er

ultimatum ai di mei deng

bourgeoisie bu er qiao yia

The famous writer Lusun in his prose entitled Fe Er Pe Lai Ying Gai Huan Xing used the phrase fair play; the title translates into No Fair Play Now. Another writer, Xia Yian, in his novel Baoshen Gong (Contracted Children Workers), used Number One, name wen, for the brutal foreman of the children workers.

Of course, western science and technology exerted great influence on China, so that some scientific terms were borrowed into Chinese. Of 104 chemical elements, only about ten are direct meaning translations, such as:

Fe tie

Cu tong

N dan

Pb qian

Ag yin

Hg gong

H qing

O yang

C tan

The others are all sound translations, such as:

Na na

Ca gai

Ba bei

Mn meng

Most units of physics are sound borrowings:

ampere anpei

watt wa te

Hz hezi

gram ke

volt fute

calorie ka lu li or ka

Some medical terms, especially the names of medicines, are borrowed directly from English words:

aspirin a si pi lin

analgesic an nai jin

rutin lu ding

penicillin pan ni xi lin

atropine a tu pin.

cocaine ke ka in

Some scientific terms were first borrowed with their original sounds; later, these sound-translations were dropped and new words were invented to carry the meaning.

ENGLISH PHONETIC REPLACEMENT AND LITERAL

WORD GLOSSES

penicillin pan ni xi qingmei su ‘green fungus lin element’

laser lai sai ji guang ‘exaggerated light’

motor ma da dian dong ji ‘electric-powered machine’

engine yin qing fa dong ji ‘a machine that can start another machine’

microphone mai ke feng kuoin qi ‘sound transmitting device’

Readers may be more interested in the common words popular in standard spoken Chinese language in which there are some words directly borrowed from English:

model moter

sofa sha fa

disco di si ke

cocoa keke

Coca Cola kekou kele

pump beng

nylon ni long

cashmere kai si mi

tank tang ke

poker pu ke

tango tan ge

jeep ji pu

chocolate qiao ke li (standard; different from Shanghai zhu gu li)

pound bang (two written forms in Chinese standing for British currency unit and weight respectively, but of the same sound)

Kentucky Fried Chicken has changed into kente ji: kente keeps the sound of “Kentu,” and ji meaning ‘chicken,’ imitates the sound of “ky.” Chinese has no sound for /ki/; ji is a phonetic adaptation.

MacDonald mai ke tang na

hamburger hanbao bao

hot dog regou

These terms are very popular in Beijing for the two restaurants were opened there. Even the modern American slang cool, ‘excellent’ has become Chinese:ku. The interjection word wau (Wow!) can be heard on radio or television. Chinese children, even in the countryside, say bai bai to their parents instead of zai jian.

It is interesting to note that a Chinese writer called on the Chinese to invite “Mr. De” and “Mr. Sai” to China, de standing for democracy and sai for science.

Some translations are most fortuitous both in sound and meaning: for Coca-Cola, kekou means ‘tasty’ and kele ‘satisfied.’ Baishi kele is Pepsi Cola; this translates into ‘satisfied with everything.’ There are occasional anecdotes created around the inevitable ambiguities that arise: one day an old country man heard one young fellow mention disco; the old man thought that the young man was to kick his dog to death, since disco sounds like di si kou, which sounds like ti si gou; ti ‘kick’ + si ‘death’ + gou ‘dog.’

Some of the borrowed words are formed with combinations of sounds and meaning:

car ka che: ka repeats the sound of car, and che means ‘carriage’

card ka pian: ka imitates the sound; pian means ‘piece,’ or ‘page,’ or ‘card’

carbine kabin qiang: kabin imitates the sound of combine; qiang means ‘gun’

rifle laifu qiang; laifu imitates the sound of rifle

butter baituo you: baituo imitates the sound; you means ‘oil’ or ‘grease’

beer pi jiu; pi imitates the sound; jiu means ‘wine’

Chaplin’s film Modern Times was translated into Medeng Shidai, a typical example of combination translation: medeng is a phonetic rendition of modern; shidai means ‘times.’ The Chinese word for times is very old; medeng is a new word.

In semi-colonial China, because of the underdevelopment of science and technology, even some simple products such as nails, matches, colorful clothes, and soaps had to be imported from abroad. So even though the Chinese language was used, the modifier yang ‘foreign or imported’ had to be added:

nails yang ding

matches yang huo

oil yang yiou

soap yang yizi

cement yang hui; (literally, ‘foreign ash’)

With the development of industry, yang was deleted. Now the young generation of Chinese do not understand yang yizi; they know fei zao for soap, or xiang zao for toilet soap. The age when foreign oils, Mobil and Shell, were dominant in the Chinese market has gone. Nevertheless, in some Chinese novels and films and in some spoken Chinese, we can hear yang guizi, ‘foreign devil,’ a derogatory term referring to a foreigner, especially from western countries, like Professor Charlie Blinderman, who was kind enough to type this article.

In the mainland of China, in Taiwan, and in Hong Kong there may be different translations of the same English word. The English word computer was translated into ji suan ji ‘calculating machine,’ in the mainland of China, but into dian nao, ‘electronic brain’ in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In spite of political barriers, the academic circle in the mainland of China prefer dian nao to their original translation of ‘calculating machine’: calculating being just one of the several functions of computers, Taiwan’s translation is felt to be more exact. There have been a lot of different translations of computer terms which are waiting for unification by the Chinese scholars on both sides of the Taiwan channel.

Kennedy on the mainland is ken ni di; but in Taiwan it is gan nai di. Bush on the mainland is bu shi; but in Taiwan it is bu xi. New Zealand is niu xi lan in Taiwan; but it is xin xi lan on the mainland.

It is certain there will be more and more English words coming into the Chinese vocabulary, and vice-versa. Chinese has made many contributions to English, among them typhoon, sampan, taipan, tea, silk, tong, Shanghai as a verb, and tofu. The Chinese words kung fu and wok are currently in vogue in the US, whence they are likely to spread to other English-speaking countries.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Life & Times of the English Language: A History of Our Marvellous Native Tongue

Robert Claiborne, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1991), xi + 329pp.

This is a new edition (1990) of the popular book first published in 1983. The differences are hard to discern, but no matter, for the book is a user-friendly excursion through the history of the language, with many good examples of loanwords, derivations, and other linguistic incunabula, curiosa, and paraphernalia interestingly presented in a lively fashion by a good writer. Not written for academics, the book makes a fine introduction to the subject and has a useful Index.

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins: The History of Over 8,000 Words Explained

John Ayto, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1991), viii + 583pp.

This is a paperback reprint of the 1990 book reviewed in these pages in the Winter 1990 issue [XVII,3]. We still like it.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Dr. Robert Stein testified that he put the eight separate pieces of Bridges' body together in the alley and then pronounced Bridges dead.” [From the Chicago Tribune, 3 July 1986: 2,3. Submitted by M.C. Thomas, Chicago.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“2: The new British Library—sitting comfortably on enlarged piles.” [Sidebar headline in the New Scientist, 27 March 1986: 28. Submitted by Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt, Washington, DC.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of major head injuries in this area…some major fractures require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents may not permit the person to do athletics forever.” [From the UCLA Bruin, 23 November 1987. Submitted by John Paul Arnerich, Los Angeles.]

Reaching for the Ready-Made

Anthony Cowie, The University of Leeds

As every good copywriter knows, one of the most effective ways of drawing the attention of newspaper readers to a consumer advertisement is to juggle cleverly with the shape and meaning of a familiar idiom or set phrase. One famous British advertisement for eggs urged readers to “Go to work on an egg!” Go to work on can of course be interpreted idiomatically as ‘attack,’ but the presentation also hinted wittily at the literal sense of the phrase by portraying a man pedaling to work on a cycle with a single egg-shaped wheel. More recently, a quality Sunday newspaper has run an advertisement for a nippy hatchback car under the caption “A hardy performer wins its laurels.” This heading has layers of meaning that can be peeled off like the skins of an onion. The tough little runabout has certainly won an accolade from the motoring press. But hardy performer also suggests hardy annual and, as any gardener knows, the laurel is a shrub that survives out of doors throughout the winter, just as a maid-of-all-work minicar has to fetch and carry in all weathers. On another level again, we recognize the vintage comedy performers Laurel and Hardy—one pretty light on his feet, the other with solider qualities.

In advertising, almost any type of fixed expression can be pressed into service. Some familiar phrases—such as go to work on—are plain idioms with no cultural overtones. But Laurel and Hardy, like Astaire and Rogers (or Rodgers and Hart) are part of the history of popular entertainment in this century. In those examples, the popular culture is shared: the references are understood by moviegoers and radio listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. In other cases, the appeal is to something specifically American or peculiarly British, as in the ad that referred to a popular brand of matches as “The Light Brigade” and to its price as “The Charge.”

Set phrases not only serve as arresting openings and closings in advertising; they also function as headlines in newspaper articles, quotable climaxes in political speeches, and punch-lines in jokes, as when a Times journalist attending a demonstration of teachers outside Parliament wrote:

It grew minute by minute windier and colder.

To one of the press cameramen it was a good joke: “You’ve got the thin blue line here all right.”

Idioms are frequently fossilized metaphors: the thin red line, which lies at the back of this piece of wordplay, means ‘the heroic resistance of the few against many,’ and originally described a regiment of redcoated highlanders at the battle of Balaclava. In the puns we have been looking at, the writer may revive and extend a metaphor (portraying the teachers as a small embattled force, but making them blue with cold, as well) while at the same time changing the form of the expression. And as we saw with Laurel and Hardy, such phrases are not only thought of as normally fixed but are also deeply embedded in a culture. For this reason, writers produce a mild shock-effect by distorting their forms or making over their meanings.

Fixed expressions that are open to humorous reshaping are, of course, not always reshaped. And there are important types in English that are hardly ever adapted at all. Consider the “formulae” we regularly use to direct or punctuate the flow of conversation and often, too, to indicate the speaker’s attitude to the person addressed. Among such formulae, “You have to be kidding!” or “You must be joking!” (the first mainly American, the second largely British) are used to express skeptical dismissal of a claim or suggestion:

“Fred buy a round of drinks! You must be joking!”

In contrast, wholehearted agreement with an earlier claim can be signaled by “You can say that again!”— though as with “You must be joking,” this gambit would only be used among people of roughly the same age or status. Consider this exchange:

A: I wish they’d get round a table and sort the whole thing out.

B: You can say that again!

Now if A were a professor—or an older person of any standing—and B a student, then B’s gambit might well seem impertinent. I mention this detail—which by the way is seldom treated in dictionaries—because as speakers of English we usually have little freedom to decide how formulae are used. (Note, too, how in “You can say that again,” the stress is always on that.)

When writers wish to convey the opposite of what they seem to be saying on the surface, they can do so by engineering a change of style or tone. When Cole Porter in the song “Just One of those Things” wants to suggest the painful directness with which Dorothy Parker might have sent a discarded lover on his way, he switches incongruously from plain language to an Elizabethan flourish:

As Dorothy Parker once said

To her boyfriend “Fare thee well.”

Later on, he changes the direction of the stylistic switch, and the move along the time scale, by ending with a piece of up-to-date slang:

As Columbus announced

When he knew he was bounced,

“It was swell, Isabel, swell.”

But Porter is not content simply to shift to a style that is out of keeping with the speaker or period. He gives extra humor and zest to the erstwhile lover’s goodbye by wrapping it in a familiar set phrase. This is a favorite Porter device, used as here in the verse but also in the title and refrain—It was just one of those things. The trick is not confined to Porter. One of the best-known numbers in the Gershwin score for the movie musical Shall We Dance? originates in a well-known formula, “They can’t take that away from me,” which duly appears as the climax of the chorus. But the last word in more senses than one goes to Irving Berlin. In a perfectly constructed ballad of the depressed mid-thirties he captures the mood of our own impoverished times and offers his punning remedy to gloom:

Before the fiddlers have fled,

Before they ask us to pay the bill,

And while we still have a chance,

Let’s face the music and dance.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“We’re going to pay now, or pay later. Now, we’re paying later.” [Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.), commenting on the need for prenatal care for poor women, NBC Today, 26 January 1988. Submitted by William Johnston, Boulder, Colorado.] “New Faces to Fill Pleasants Seats.” [Headline in the Parkersburg (West Virginia) News, 30 October 1986. Submitted by Glade Little, Parkersburg.]

Eyebrows and Lowbrows

Robert A. Fowkes, Yonkers, NY

I once thought that most languages would have separate words to identify and denote eyebrows, eyelids, and eyelashes, features about as easily and objectively observed as ears or lips. French seemed to bear this out with sourcil ‘eyebrow,’ paupière ‘eyelid,’ and cil ‘eyelash,’ although the literal sense of sourcil (‘upper lash’) seemed not too appropriate. (Note also the obvious double duty of cil.) But such trouble as there was stemmed largely from goings-on in Latin.

Latin had terms for ‘eyebrow’ and ‘eyelid’ that were the sources of the French ones (Lat supercilium and palebra), but ‘eyelash’ evidently caused trouble. Some Roman authors resorted to palpebrārum pilus lit. ‘eyelids’ hair' for ‘eyelashes.’ To complicate matters, they also used the plural of ‘eyebrow’ (supercilia) to mean ‘eyelashes.’ And cilium, which meant ‘upper eyelid’ to Pliny the Elder, acquired in later centuries the senses of ‘eyebrow,’ ‘eyelid,’ and ‘eyelash.’ Körting’s Lateinisch-Romanisches Wörterbuch (Stechert’s 1923 repr.) glossed cilium as ‘eyebrow,’ as the only meaning (Col. 271, No. 2176). Pokorny, echoing predecessors, suggested that cilium meant the lower lid and supercilium the upper (553). But supercilium meant ‘eyebrow’!

Italian has inherited some of the confusion of Latin. It agrees with the ancestral tongue in sopracciglio for ‘eyebrow’ (compare Fr sourcil) and in palebra for ‘eyelid’ (Fr paupière). But Ital ciglio can mean either ‘eyebrow’ or ‘eyelash,’ and regional variants complicate the picture.

Portuguese has sobrancelha and palebra, in agreement with Latin, French, and Italian. But for ‘eyelash’ it has pestana, matching Spanish pestaña (compare Sp pestañear ‘blink’). Spanish has ceja for ‘eyebrow,’ however, probably from the Lat plural cilia.

The purpose of this article is not primarily to establish etymologies—although that is partly involved—but to note the extent to which the three elements discussed are kept distinct (or the opposite) in certain languages. Welsh has a word for ‘brow’ (ael) and a word for ‘lid’ (amrant), but, although there is an expression meaning ‘eyelash,’ it is a phrase: blew yr amrant (‘hair of the eyelid,’ reminiscent of Lat palpebrārum pilus). The Breton for ‘eyebrow,’ abrant, seems akin to Welsh amrant ‘eyelid,’ while Cornish abrans ‘eyebrow’ is patently closer to Breton (as is often the case). Bret malvenn can mean ‘eyelid’ or ‘eyelash’ and is probably a compound (“browhair”). (Compare Middle Irish finda malach with the same sense.) A separate term in Breton for ‘eyelash’ is kroc’han lagad ‘skin of the eye.’ It is easier for me to conceive of eyelashes as hair than as skin.

Goidelic Celtic does not have clearcut terms for brow, lid, and lash either. There is an Irish mala ‘eyebrow’ (Gaelic mala also; compare Bret malvenn, above) side by side with the synonymous braoi, which may be related to or borrowed from English brow. Irish fabhra means ‘eyelid’ and ‘eyelash’ (and, at times, ‘eye’). Gaelic fabhradh appears to mean ‘eyelash’ and may share the other senses of Irish fabhra. Gaelic rosc (alternating with rasg) means ‘eyelid’ and ‘eyelash,’ as well as ‘eye’. (Old Irish rosc meant ‘eye.')

German clearly distinguishes Augenbraue ‘eyebrow,’ Augenlid ‘eyelid,’ and Augenwimper ‘eyelash.’ Scandinavian languages also show separate terms for the three. English eyebrow and German Augenbraue are matched by Swedish ögenbryn, Norwegian øyebryn, Danish øjenbryn, Icelandic (Old and Mod.) augabrún, Faroese eygnabro. In Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian “eye-hair” is used for eyelashes: Swed. ögonhår, Dan. øjenhår, Icel. augnahár. But Norwegian has øyevipper for ‘eyelash’ (compare Ger Augenwimper), and Danish has, in addition to øjenhår, a secondary word for eyelash, øjenvipper. For ‘eyelid,’ several Scandinavian languages have words ending with the element lok, etc. (‘lock, cover, lid’), for example, Swedish ögonlock, Danish øjenlåg, Norwegian øyelokk, Faroese eygnalok. An old Icelandic word hvarma ‘eyelid’ persists in archaic style in Modern Icelandic as well as in Faroese, where it is in competition with eygnalok. An Old Icelandic kenning, hvarm-skógr, literally, ‘eye-woods,’ means ‘eyelashes,’ as if implying that the lashes resemble trees lined up along the eyelid. And geisli hvarma, literally ‘beam of the lids,’ means ‘eye.’ Yet, apart from such figurative and poetic language, Icelandic seems not to confuse lids and lashes.

In Welsh, there is, in addition to the primary word for ‘eyelid’ (amrant), a secondary expression clawr llygad, literally, ‘eye cover,’ = ‘eyelid.’ In Middle Welsh, the word for ‘brow’ can also mean ‘lid.’

There are, in various parts of the world, languages with unambiguous designations of the three periophthalmic structures discussed. A sampling of those languages follows. The words mean, of course, ‘eyebrow,’ ‘eyelid,’ and ‘eyelash,’ as indicated.

‘eyebrow’ ‘eyelid’ ‘eyelash’

Russian brov’ v’eko recnítsa

Polish brew powieka rzesa

E. Armenian honk h kop arteanunk h

Mod. Greek phúdia matotsúnoura vlépharo

Yiddish brem oygnledl vi-\?\

Lithuanian añtakis vókas blakstíena

Farsi âbru pelk možé

Ossetic has specific designations for eyebrows and eyelashes (ærphÿg and tsæstÿxau, respectively, as transcribed from Cyrillic). It also distinguishes upper eyelids (\?\ æltŭÿphal) and lower eyelids (dæltiŭÿphal). I am not usually aware that I have lower lids, except when something ails them, but the Ossetes specify upper or lower lid without batting an eyelash. I am trying to find out whether they can say ‘eyelid’ itself, sans ‘upper’ or ‘lower.’ Dictionaries seem to offer scant help. The Digor dialect (in the west and north of the Ossete region) seems to have such a separate word resembling the second part of the Ossetic ones given above. Since Ossetic is an Indo-European language (specifically Iranic; one of its chief varieties is called Iron—and in Germ. Ironisch!), we might expect to find some meaning in the words or their parts. Waldteufel will hardly do as a cognate of the ‘upper’ word, nor Daredevil of the lower. It seems that dæl- ‘lower’ is from the Indo-European source of words like East Frisian del ‘down,’ English dale, Old Church Slavic dolŭ ‘down,’ dolinŭ ‘lower.’

This consideration of the varying ways in which the physiological features of brows, lids, and lashes are perceived in some languages, despite their possibility of being objectively observed, is part of the larger question of how the parts of the body are named. The often important factor of taboo seems not to operate here too conspicuously, although the superstition of the evil eye is often a potent consideration. It may, in fact, be reflected in Irish mac imreasan ‘pupil of the eye’ (probably literally ‘son of contention’ or the like).

English regards lungs as a plural (at least its speakers do), but German die Lunge is singular. In some languages foot and leg are not differentiated, note Russian nogá ‘foot, leg.’ Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Khalkha Mongolian share that characteristic. But, while Russian can denote ‘arm’ and ‘hand’ by one word (ruká), Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Khalkha Mongolian have separate words for ‘arm’ and ‘hand.’

In English, as in German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, etc., we distinguish between fingers and toes, physiologically and lexically. In some languages (Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Czech, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Welsh, Irish, and others) the same word denotes both finger and toe (although it must be remembered that when there is need to specify that toes and not fingers are meant, or vice versa, there are ways to do so in those languages).

In some languages a distinction is made between chin and jaw, in others not. Hair of the head is at times called by a different word from that for hair elsewhere on the body (Welsh gwallt vs. blew, for example). In English this difference is not found, except possibly in medical contexts.

We might well inquire whether a language lacking a certain distinction (like that between eyelids and eyelashes) also lacks other distinctions (and shares the lacks with other languages). Parallels are difficult to discover, except fragmentarily. Those languages which show no difference in words for finger and toe do not necessarily suffer (if that is the right word) the lack of distinction between lid and lash, etc.

A high-school Latin teacher used to give us what he called “language correlations,” writing one or two of them on the blackboard each day. He aimed at general (maybe “universal”) claims and mentioned no languages by name. Some of his correlations that I still recall were: “Languages with an ablative case will have no word for have.” “Languages with the same word for green and blue have no plural nouns or adjectives.” “Languages with more than three degrees of comparison of adjectives lack words for yes and no.” “Languages which do not distinguish thumb and finger have no word for hedgehog.” Here he was no doubt pulling our legs (or feet?).

It is possible to think of languages in which his strangely selected correlations apply. The first could be Latin, the second Japanese (a language he had studied), the third might be true of a Celtic language, etc. At any rate, he never seemed to bother about brows, lids, and lashes, although his attitude was sometimes supercilious.

Dictionaries for Advanced Learners and Users of Foreign Languages

Frank Knowles, Aston University

It is widely acknowledged that complaints about missing items in the range of dictionaries required by advanced learners and users of foreign languages are justified to a very considerable extent. Clearly, distinctions need to be made about the particular first, or native language (L1) and the second language (L2) of such learners if the above common perception is to be substantiated. If we are talking about Finns attempting to learn Turkish or Korean then no one, surely, is going to argue that point, except to make the observation, perhaps, that such hapless Finns are going to have to operate via an “interlingua” (and its dictionaries), such as English, German, or Russian. If, on the other hand, it is a matter of native speakers of English grappling with the task of acquiring a sophisticated knowledge of German or Russian, then difficulties associated with dictionaries will be of a lesser order, but there will still be many occasions on which such learners will, by reflex action, stretch out a hand to grab hold of a dictionary that simply does not exist!

A root cause of this problem is the logically reasonable but in reality fallacious contention that what you cannot find in a dictionary you are entitled to find in a grammar and—nota bene!—vice versa. Of course, we all know that there is a tangible overlap between dictionaries and grammars rather than a no-man’s land between them, and this in spite of their different purposes. Given that grammars are often used on a systematic basis—the regularities dominate the idiosyncrasies—grammarians write and format them on that basis; yet grammars are also used, exceedingly often, on a single-shot basis, a quick “in and out,” just like a normal dictionary consultation. If learners want more than a valency pattern for a particular verb or group of verbs or more than the translation equivalent(s) of a single source-language word, where do they turn? The traditional and often cynical-sounding counsel given to students complaining about this dilemma is: “Go away and read and/or listen to twenty million words in your L2 and you will find that the problem is diminished.” The counselor’s hope is that the student will hone to quasi-perfection a fine ability to detect, capture, and internalize information about the occurrence, co-occurrence and patterning of lexis in context, plus a lot else besides. Maybe there was or is a subconscious view that the path to L2 proficiency and success is open only to those who can summon up the intellectual energy and also physical, “dictionary-(man)handling” stamina for the task. It is a moot point whether it is better for the student to read— let us say—the twenty million running words of text, or read the same ten million words twice or even read the same five million words four times over! Similar questions can reasonably be asked about the homogeneity versus heterogeneity of subject matter and stylistic mode of this reasonably extensive material amounting to about one hundred to one hundred and fifty average-sized books.

Let us assume that advanced students of a particular L2 have equipped themselves with the following reference “word books”: a “top of the range” L1→L2 and L2→L1 dictionary; a “college” -sized defining dictionary produced for and within their “target” L2 discourse community; the best available L2 synonym dictionary and thesaurus; and a dictionary of proverbs and idioms. Ideally, they should also own their FL equivalent of Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Great Britain. If this is not available, they should start compiling their own, on cards if necessary but ideally as a computerized database. They should also have access to a large encyclopedia written in the L2. With this back-up are they well prepared for the intricate task of composing documents in their L2 on various topics? They are probably reasonably well prepared in general terms but not so in particular terms. What they lack in terms of general lexical resources is a collocations dictionary and a “synonym differentiator,” such as —in the case of a German—Duden’s Die richtige Wortwahl, which subtitles itself as a “comparative dictionary of sense-related expression.” For this aspect of L2 writing, incidentally, advanced Russian-speaking students of English may have recourse to the excellent English-Russian Synonym Dictionary, by A.A. Rozenman and Y.D. Apresyan (Russki Yazyk Publishing House, 1980); this compendium contains 350 synonymic series, and each article in the dictionary explains the meaning of the lexemes comprising the synonymic series, provides a “best approximation” translation, and—crucially—supplies a detailed characterization of the similarities and differences between the synonyms, offering at the same time an analysis of the conditions in which each synonym is appropriate and where they may substitute for each other. All of this is exemplified by belletristic citations. Advanced Russian-speaking students and users of German have available the major Deutsch-russisches Synonymwörterbuch, by I.V. Rakhmanov et alii (Russki Yazyk, in 1983). This thoroughly researched and crafted reference book contains approximately 2,500 entries, each representing a synonymic series. All items are “quasialigned” with translation equivalents and are illustrated by example sentences—not citations—in German, which are also given in Russian translation. The front matter of both of these dictionaries from Russia includes substantial theoretical essays on the theory of synonymy and on the lexicographic practicalities of arraying and presenting synonyms in dictionary format.

It is clear that collocations dictionaries and “synonym differentiators” may not exist at all in a particular language community: in fact, very few language communities can boast of such resources. That is a great pity because that is exactly what advanced learners need. In fact, it is not stretching things too much to say that first-class collocational control is the hallmark of the true L2 expert; collocational control is normally the last linguistic subsystem to be mastered by learners who proceed to an advanced level. Correct deployment of collocations is particularly important for anyone striving for authenticity of performance within a particular professional sociolect, such as the language of medicine or economics.

No one could claim that it is an easy task to create collocations dictionaries: the chief problem is where to draw the proverbial line on a spectrum ranging from complete predictability, usually on a left-to-right basis, to total volatility of association by mere juxtaposition, for example, corned beef v. cheap beef. The dictionary maker’s job is to capture the “habitualisms” without overloading the dictionary with items which are putatively valid enough in absolute terms by not in the statistical sense of significance derived via measurable co-occurrence.

It has to be admitted that there are far too few collocations dictionaries around. In the English-speaking dictionary microcosm The Oxford Thesaurus (1991), has clearly stolen a march over all its rivals in terms of size, structure, and depth of treatment. Synonym differentiation was evidently—and rightly—seen as a crucial task and the thoroughness with which this task was carried out is one the dictionary’s most important assets. In fact, the provision of one example for each sense group within an entry is an innovative and pragmatically satisfactory way of hinting at the possibility and permissibility of collocation with other words a writer, whose native language is not English, may have in mind at the moment of consultation. Useful though that is, the best-known genuine collocations dictionary for English—probably, however, only until the publication of the seriously delayed “Words in Use” compilation from the Cobuild stable—is undoubtedly the BBI Combinatory Dictionary, by M. Benson, E. Benson, and R. Ilson (Benjamin, 1986). Two other notable dictionaries come from Poland: Selected English Collocations, by H. Dzierżanowska and C. Kozlowska (PWN Warsaw, 2nd ed., 1988) and English Adverbial Collocations, by C. Kozlowska (PWN Warsaw, 1991). [See p. 35.] In Great Britain the Cobuild Collocations Dictionary is eagerly awaited.

A quite remarkable and innovative dictionary is now about to appear in revised, updated, and enlarged re-edition: this is I.I. Ubin’s Dictionary of Russian and English lexical intensifiers (Russki Yazyk, orig. pub. 1987). In essence, this is a versatile two-way bilingual (Russian↔English) collocation dictionary providing information about how to “intensify,” “heighten,” or “escalate” the basic meanings of nouns on the one hand, and verbs and adjectives on the other, by qualifying them with adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The dictionary’s structure is quadripartite with appropriate cross-referencing, linkage, and metalinguistic information. Each of the Russian and English “halves” has two sections: the first comprises the alphabetically ordered listing of the “intensificands,” each of which constitutes a dictionary entry. To each “intensificand” is appended a translation equivalence and an alphabetic list of permissible intensifiers. The second section consists of an alphabetically ordered inverted list of intensifiers, alongside each of which is a list of those “intensificands” which it can modify. Altogether, the dictionary yields some 10,400 Russian collocations and about 12,500 English collocations.

A. Reum’s A Dictionary of English Style, republished by Hueber in 1961 but dating back six decades, was intended by its author as a reference work which would allow writers to formulate their ideas in German yet express them in English, using typically English modes of thought and linguistic templates. The same author is noteworthy for his Petit Dictionnaire de Style (1911) which offers German speakers an “open sesame” to authentic French. This handbook was conceived as a linguistic guide which would somehow prevent its users from grabbing hold of a German→French dictionary the moment their personal vocabulary ran out.

Collocations dictionaries published in Russia for advanced L2 learners of Russian date back a quarter of a century or so and have developed a very high degree of variety and sophistication over the intervening years. The afore-mentioned variety extends, for instance, from learner’s dictionaries of collocations for RSP (‘Russian for specific purposes’) areas as disparate as agriculture, materials science, and sociopolitical discourse. The main general collocations dictionary is Slovar' sochetaemosti slov russkogo yazyka ‘Russian Word-combinatory Dictionary’), by P.N. Denisov and V.V. Markovkin (Russki Yazyk, 1983). Such is the depth of the lexicographical treatment that the dictionary, whilst containing only 2,500 articles, occupies 685 pages!

In Germany the nearest thing to a “straight” collocations dictionary is E. Agricola’s regularly republished Wörter und Wendungen, written for Germans but highly valuable for foreigners using German at an advanced level. It is, however, worth examining H. Becker’s Stilwörterbuch (Leipzig, 1964-66). Although containing a mere couple of hundred entries or so, the dictionary is valuable by virtue of the depth of treatment and the ramifications of the information supplied.

Mention needs to be made, finally, of one other publication from Germany: H. Erk’s Zur Lexik wissenschaftlicher Fachtexte, Vols. 4, 5, & 6 (Hueber, 1972-82). Its aim is to provide frequency data and modes of use of the basic vocabulary of German academic discourse. The value of this work is diminished by the fact that the citations given are merely sub-sentence fragments from the corpus, which was assembled for the frequency study itself, thus denying users the opportunity to make full use of this important data.

This last point opens the door for a plea, or at least a statement of a desideratum perceived by advanced users of various L2s and by their teachers. Notwithstanding the logistic difficulties of constructing “synonym differentiators” and collocations dictionaries, particularly the latter, it is now possible for information technology to deliver direct to socalled end-users lexical data retrieval systems of great size, power, and usefulness. Any “doubting Thomases” should make arrangements to view and use the CD-ROM implementations of dictionaries from such famous publishers as Oxford University Press, Langenscheidt, and Robert. The writer of these lines believes that the CD-ROM implementation of Le Grand Robert, for instance, is not only a paragon of dictionary content but of navigation software and of the retrieval tools provided. What advanced users of various L2s need, by comparison, is ridiculously simple: they need a lexical data retrieval system—is this sophisticated enough to deserve the term “lexical database?” —which will allow them to enter a search word of interest, either from L1 or L2, and view nothing more than an arbitrarily chosen number of underlying corpus citations relating to one target-language lexeme, so that they can get a feel for its semantic range and combinatory-collocatory possibilities. Of course, they should be able to choose how many citations, what language level they come from etc. They should also be able to operate various controls to refine search strategies; still, when all is said and done, all they want is authentic citations and authentic collocations.

The main benefit of having such a facility is to accelerate learning and growth of confidence by dint of exposure to much more and much better focused linguistic material. All of this is so easy from the technological point of view—how does it look from the commercial angle? Responses or ripostes awaited!

The Coming Hybrids

Tom McArthur, Editor, English Today

In the Philippines, someone asked not long ago, Sainyong palagay, what will be the long-term economic effects sa ating bansa ng Middle East War? This question blends Tagalog and English, in a widespread medium that Filipinos call Taglish or Mix-Mix. The Tagalog elements mean ‘in your opionion’ and ‘on our country of the.’ In northern India, someone might say, Mai ap ko batati hum, he is a very reliable fellow, where the opening words are Hindi for ‘I tell you.’ This time, the mélange is called Hindlish. A similar statement in Malaysia could be This morning I hantar my baby tu dekat babysitter tu lah, in which the first and second Malay elements mean ‘took’ and ‘to the,’ and the particle lah shows that speaker and hearer are socially close. Finally, on the other side of the world, a Latino on the US-Mexican border might observe, with a shrug, Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y terminó en español. And this time the mix is known as Spanglish or Tex-Mex.

Such hybridization is all the rage on every continent in the world and shows no sign of letting up. It is so common that many jokey and dismissive blends formed on -lish have almost become technical terms. Among them are Arablish, Chinglish, Frenglish, Gerlish and Deutschlish, Italglish, Janglish and Japlish, Russlish, and Yinglish. The complex and fluid developments in the European Community, between English and eight other languages, have been labeled in at least four ingeniously pejorative ways, as Eurolish, Eurospeak, Desperanto, and Minglish (the first two also used to denote and deride Common Market bureaucratese, the third to catch the confusion that can arise among simultaneous translators).

Although picturesque labels like these indicate both amusement and anger among those who use them, they do not match the scale of what is happening. The hybrids they denote may be mocked, denounced, enjoyed, or ignored by teachers, linguists, and the media, but regardless of censure or praise they just steamroller on. Vast and utterly pragmatic, they are used as freely by the purists who condemn them (when they relax) as by those who simply go with the flow. The hybridization of English with innumerable other languages on a one-to-one basis is a product of necessity and one of the most remarkable developments in communication that has ever taken place. Many have written on whether English will supplant other languages, but few have considered whether English (among other things) is simply going to merge with many of them, for certain purposes at least.

This miscegenation is of course what has always happened when people comfortable in two languages use them freely in their daily affairs. In the heat of the moment, expressions in one language come more quickly to the tongue than expressions in the other—and speakers may never be sure at any time which will provide the next word, phrase, clause, or sentence. In an important sense, such mixers do not have just two systems, A and B, to work with, but four: a spectrum of A, AB, BA and B. This universal quartet of possibilities is nicely reflected in such current sets of labels as English— Frenglish—franglais—français in Quebec, English— Taglish—Engalog—Tagalog in the Philippines, and English—Spanglish—englañol—espanol in Puerto Rico.

In general terms, when bilinguals are talking with speakers of Language A alone, they stay pretty well inside A, and the same with B. But when they are together, and especially if they constitute a large community, they splice the contents of their languages into new and often unpredictable patterns; this happened in England when Old English and Norman French came together after 1066, giving rise to the Middle English hybrid that was in due course used to such effect by Chaucer and Malory.

English is now Language A or B in the repertoire of millions throughout the world. These versatile bilinguals are at least as significant for the future of the language as the more or less unilingual communities of the UK, and US, and Australia; indeed, they may be more significant because they outnumber the unilinguals. In such states as Canada, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore, the mixers are already key figures in the shaping of national usage. Bilingual and multilingual communities are often the product (in part at least) of colonial pasts, as in the Philippines, Malaysia, and India, but not always: they can also be the outcome of simple proximity, as when Mexican Spanish and American English come intimately together in a Texas supermarket:

HUSBAND: ¿Que necessitamos?

WIFE: Hay que comprar pan, con thin slices. [to sales clerk] ¿Donde está el thin-slice bread?

CLERK: Está an aisle three, sobre el second shelf, en el wrapper rojo.

WIFE: No lo encuentro.

CLERK: Tal vez out of it.

From “Tex-Mex,” Lorraine Goldman, English Today, January 1986.

Translation: H: What do we need? W: We have to buy bread, with thin slices. Where’s the thin-slice bread? C: It’s in aisle three on the second shelf, in the red wrapper. W: I can’t find it. C: Maybe we’re out of it.

It is a venerable truism that English has long been “a mongrel tongue” with a “hybrid heritage.” Writers about the language routinely describe and illustrate its ancient talent for picking up bits and bobs from all kinds of sources, from Arabic to Zulu. From time to time scholars have debated whether Modern English should be listed not just as a Germanic language, but in lexical terms as a Romance language—in effect as a hybrid that is now spinning off further hybrids, such as “Anglo-Malay” and “Anglo-Hindi.”

“Anglo-Japanese” (or, informally, “Japlish”) is an intriguing case because of the economic prominence of Japan, the relative one-sidedness at present of the flow of words, and the restrictedness of Japanese, a language little used outside the home islands. Since immediately after World War II, the massive inflow of English words has represented modernity and “internationalization.” Many thousands of items in contemporary urban Japanese usage are adapted English words, nativized by reshaping their syllabic patterns into forms that can be written in katakana symbols and pronounced without difficulty.

Specimens of this virtually machinelike process include erekutoronikkusu ‘electronics,’ kurisumasu ‘Christmas,’ and purutoniumu ‘plutonium.’ Words with sounds that are not present in Japanese are given the best local fit, as in takushi ‘taxi,’ rabu ‘love,’ and basu both ‘bus’ and ‘bath.’ Some loanwords undergo a semantic shift, as with manshon ‘high-class apartment block’ (from mansion), konpanion ‘female guide or hostess’ (from companion), and baikingu ‘buffet meal, smorgasbord’ (from Vi-king). Clippings and blends are common, such as terebi ‘television,’ masukomi ‘mass communication,’ and wapuro ‘word processor.’ English words also sometimes combine with Japanese words, as for example haburashi ‘toothbrush,’ from Japanese ha ‘tooth’ and English brush. Two or more words from English also sometimes come together in new ways, as with pureigaido (play guide) a ‘ticket agency,’ and bakkumira (back mirror) a ‘rear-view mirror.’ In Japanese such indigenous coinages are wryly referred to as wasei eigo ‘Made-in-Japan English.’

The Japanese have for some time been quietly returning the compliment. The number of loans is low and almost entirely in the field of commercial names, but their impact has been out of all proportion to those numbers. A common formula is a two-word phrase that opens with a Japanese company name and closes with a product name that is genuinely Western, as with Honda Ballade, Mitsubishi Colt, and Toyota Corolla, or that echoes such a word, as with Honda Acura (‘accurate’?), Nissan Sentra (‘central,’ ‘sentry’?), and Nissan Micra (a feminization of micro). The Japanese capacity to produce decorative off-beat English has been widely noted for some time, as in this comment from Time in 1986:

The Japanese long ago mastered the process of labeling their consumer goods to appeal to a global market. Walkman may be a piece of fractured English, but the term has become as generic and widely recognized as Xerox or Coke.

—“The Japanese Naming Game,” January 13

The term Walkman is on a par with the “atmosphere English” found on Japanese T-Shirts, bags, and pencil boxes, such as Tenderness was completed a pastel and The New York City Theatre District is where you can and us, anyone. Such novel (mis)uses of English, as tokens of modernity rather than as normal messages, are now widespread in East Asia and elsewhere. How long it will remain a standard Japanese practice and an international fad is anybody’s guess. But regardless of how decorative English develops, it seems likely that a Japanese input into English—whatever forms it takes—will steadily increase in the twenty-first century, not stay the same or diminish.

Although the various Anglo-hybrids are currently unstable, the hybridity itself is stable enough. It has been running for decades in Asia and Africa and appears to have many more decades to run. If past situations are anything to go by, those languages affected today will undergo irreversible change, as English did after the Danish invasions and the Norman Conquest. Malay by government design and Japanese by casual osmosis are already indelibly marked by borrowings (including what English took in earlier times from French, Latin, and Greek). The outcome is far from clear, but it can hardly be minor, and English will be affected in ways that we can hardly imagine.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Osborne chased it around the back of the net, dug the puck off the sideboards and fired a pass to Poddubny, who beat Buffalo goaltender Tom Barrasso between the legs.” [From an AP story in the Danbury News-Times, 13 November 1986. Submitted by Ed Rosenberg, Danbury. Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances. And was Barrasso so named for playing bottomless?]

Humor Caribbean Style

Jeannette Allsopp, Caribbean Lexicography Project, Barbados

There is no nation or country on earth that does not have its own style of humor, hence the proliferation of Irish jokes, Jewish jokes, Russian jokes, Polish jokes, etc. Humor is defined in the OED as “that quality of action, speech, or writing which excites amusement” and in MWIII as “that expression of ideas in a happening, an action, a situation, or an expression of ideas which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous.” We all know the highly beneficial effects of laughter on our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Luckily for us Caribbeans, humor plays a great part in our daily lives and laughter is generally much more common than a gloomy face. Perhaps this is related to our down-to-earth, often rather unsophisticated use of language, especially at the folk level.

A few examples (from the Archives of the Caribbean Lexicography Project) illustrate how our use of language translates into laughter.

In the 1940s a certain man-of-the-people councillor in an Eastern Caribbean island (now independent; it shall remain nameless) could not bear the thought of any kind of expenditure by the local council, apart from that on roads and water-supply, the two services that he had faithfully promised his constituents. When the question of money for urinals came up, our redoubtable councillor, in typical fashion, loudly and vehemently “abjected to spendin' the poor people money on dese urinals!” So persistent and determined was his blocking of the vote that it spurred another councillor to take him aside and explain what a urinal was. In he came again, gesticulating vigorously, to deliver this piece in support of a change of vote:

Why y’all didn’t put de thing in praper terms? Yes! Yes! I vote for them. And while you buildin' you must put in some arsenals too!

The concept of a plain-clothes policeman is familiar to most, but don’t be so sure in the Caribbean: a policeman who is not in proper unformed dress is simply not dressed, as one witness saw it in this newspaper report of her testimony in court:

Cheryl also claimed that among the men were a St Michael landlord, a uniformed policeman and others who she believed were undressed police officers carrying guns.

But if such superficial use of words suggests that their humor is hidden from the speakers concerned, it would be a mistake to take that as normal. More often, there is a deliberateness in the Caribbean speaker’s purpose to ridicule: A well-dressed girl is strutting along on the sidewalk one Sunday afternoon. A boy in rags notices her rather bony legs, so he levels her with “Hi girl, you ain' ‘fraid hungry dog see you?” A woman with noticeable steatopygia may be specially greeted in the middle of the morning or in the night with “Oh good AFTERnoon!” A teenager wearing a neat pair of trousers, probably hand-me-downs since they are much too short—so short that he would not need to pull them up to walk through water—evokes the arch query from his peers, “You expecting flood?”

The Caribbean “experience” often thrusts itself on the Eurocentric “world view” that has been superimposed by schooling or by everyday circumstances. For example, a common language exercise in schools is to ask students to complete well-known proverbial sayings like those below: each is followed by the completions given in one Caribbean school (as collected over a period of time by a teacher).

A bird in the hand will mess on your clothes.

One swallow does not make a meal.

You can’t teach an old dog so don’t waste your food.

Penny wise is too far from dollar wise.

In similar vein, there is a profusion of picturesque metaphors and similes framed in local experience as is illustrated in the following examples:

rice dog or Heinz 57 ‘a mongrel.’

pond-fly of a woman a promiscuous woman who flits around distributing her favors with premeditated and predatory intent.

yard-fowl a political sycophant or one who gives allegiance to the political party in power with a view to any pickings that he or she might receive.

banana-jockey a poor person who would cadge a ride on a truck carrying bananas to the port in the banana-producing islands of the Caribbean.

bag-blind bastard (derogatory and offensive) a person so poor that he or she lives in the meanest of dwellings with only empty sugar-bags for curtains (blinds as they are also known in the Caribbean).

breadfruit-swopper (derogatory and offensive) a person so poor that he or she has nothing to offer in exchange for any item but a home-grown breadfruit (which nearly everybody already has).

be as close as batty and po (or batty and bench) be bosom companions (batty being the Caribbean English folk term for ‘buttocks’).

give a man a jacket to present him with a child that is not his (jacket referring to an article of clothing that is not normally worn by a laborer in the Caribbean).

And what about the prominence of the word bless which carries the meaning of ‘exorcism, healing, remedy’ in Caribbean folk consciousness? So, runs one folk aphorism, “Something mus’ [be] wrong with marriage if [a] priest ha[ve] to bless it!”

In a slightly different category is a Afro-Caribbean user of words who flourishes, particularly at the folk level, immensely enjoying word-use as an exercise—even a challenge. He uses standard English word-formation devices in order to create new words with broad sensory connotations, such as foodist, bellyologist, and groggist to refer to people with uncontrolled appetites, dedicated drinkers of alcohol, and eaters.

The inventiveness of such word-users may also be uncontrolled, a feature of which little account has been taken in analyzing Caribbean language use, the display of “diction” practised by elderly men on such festive occasions as christenings and weddings, especially the latter. In most Caribbean colonies in former times, but today in a few rural communities, practitioners of the art of such “diction” were sought out and specially invited so as to give status to the ceremony at the wedding house. The following is a sample of one such speech:

Lordly ladies and magnificent gentlemen, I come on the gijantic wings of the Archangel Gabriel to expaterate the absolutely right-minded eucharistic blessings upon you-all proceedings this evening. Primarily I was entranced at the entrance by the Royal Magna Carta appearance of Mr Bridegroom and the celestial and capital incorporated specifications of Mrs Bride. A man’s a man for all that and what a piece of work is man and God saw fit that man should not be without his keepmate and took out his ribs to make his woman. Do not let any bumptious, presumptious, officious, malicious or contentious reactionary socialist come between you and interfere to counteract the felicitary interprications of your marriage bed. Distolerate him! Ostracize, cauterize and excise him! What a piece of work is man! Do not hesitate to generate and add exhilaration to our population.

…

And now to Him that giveth and taketh away and doeth exceeding great good to all that loveth Him and doeth his will willy-nilly, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of mine heart be acceptable to all of you and to both of you this day and henceforth forever, Amen.

Malcolm

Frederic G. Cassidy, Dictionary of American Regional English

My friend Malcolm is a born disciplinarian, and language annoys him no end. He feels that, as a type of mechanism, any language ought to have a predictable regularity. A lot of built-in irregularities are merely inefficient. A proper language should click along like a Swiss watch, doing its job in a no-nonsense way. As a native speaker of English, Malcolm has a difficult time. English has rules— some fairly regular rules—but too many exceptions. “Those aren’t exceptions” I tell him, “there are subrules.” He glares at me, sneaky deceiver. I am not getting away with that one.

Recently Malcolm got hold of a book on Sanskrit and has been chewing away firmly at it. That is the way a language ought to be! I remind him that there is only one Taj Mahal—and that is a tomb. The mass of humanity have to live in houses. Some hovels too, and caves and tents: palaces are relatively few. Languages built to architects' specifications are artificial and largely remain unspoken. Some are even unspeakable. If a language is to reflect what goes on in the mind, it must have a lot of flexibility, tolerance, fluency. The language genius exploits this flexibility and fluency—and makes the best of it. The language first learned fixes itself deeply in memory in the fabric of the mind. It becomes normal: it is the “idiolect”—the vehicle of thought unique to each person, the basic layer. One is seldom aware of it, but it is still there underneath. Malcolm’s language as he learned it in infancy is fixed. He does not see it as a set of rules; it is simply there and he resents tampering with it. Then he has another set of rules derived from his high-school English teacher, Miss Martinet, about double negatives, final prepositions, and other unquestionables that have an aura of Mount Sinai. Sometimes he sees me as a golden calf.

Malcolm feels that language should be strictly logical. He carries around Occam’s razor—it is his Swiss army knife. He has a sharp eye for any kind of redundancy, even when used deliberately for emphasis or to make a distinction or sense division. “A rose is a rose is a rose” —so why say it three times? There is no need for widow-woman as long as we have the word widower. The country man who speaks of a viper snake ought to know that vipers are snakes and we do not need to be told so. And when kids go swimming in the raw, of course they are bare and they are naked, so why bare-naked? They are not naked unless they are totally bare. Bare should mean ‘totally’ too. Why insist? Excitement, enthusiasm, are always messing up logic. Also messing up the language.

Malcolm has working in his office an Englishwoman who he thinks, having been born English, should have more respect for the language. She is an exuberant person, and it shows. I rather like her spontaneity, but Malcolm finds it hard to take. At office parties she finds the foods frightfully tasty or dreadfully nice, and when they are covered with sugar or whipped cream, they can be sinfully delicious. Malcolm cannot resist her—he has a sweet tooth that forever betrays him—but he finds her oxymoronic style hard to bear. Oxymorons in general, he says, are well named, and he is against them. But he is not beyond a grumbling pun on oxen and morons, while looking hard at me. I have challenged him with Pope’s line of the pun as “the lowest form of wit,” but he says “not if they are appropriate.”

Malcolm suspects great and dangerous social forces underlying changes in the use of words. Not long ago he had a running horror at what had happened to the word awful. Milton, he says, had it right, the way it should properly be: ‘full of awe, awe-inspiring,’ an awful God. But in our populist time with too many half-educated people at large, awful has become etiolated. (Nice word—one of Malcolm’s favorites.) And awesome seems now to have gone the same way—among teenagers, at least, “a raw, brainless lot.” I grant teenagers their last fling of childish freedom before adulthood begins to descend. Malcolm matured earlier than I; my occasional lapses into juvenility pain him. He is generally forgiving: he still has hopes for me.

Malcolm’s objections come not only in matters of logic—there is a moral tinge to them sometimes. He is against what seems deception, self-contradiction in public speech-making. He finds it insidious. In its linguistic form, a speaker introduces his subject by saying, “To this audience I need not explain…,” then goes on and explains it. To Malcolm this is a kind of hypocrisy: flattering the audience by pretending they know something already when he feels pretty sure they do not. To tease him I recently made a list of such phrases: It goes without saying…, I hardly need to point out…, It should be unnecessary to note that…, I will not insist on the point, but if I did… And there are others, old-timers such as Far be it from me to claim…. My list only put Malcolm into a dismal mood.

I chatter about the psychology of speech-making, catching and keeping an audience’s attention, but it does not impress him. Audiences should need no flattery. Give them the facts, the truth, no soft soap, and that should be enough. I insist on the need to repeat, to emphasize, even to exhort. Audiences appreciate a bit of verbal legerdemain. Will Rogers knew it, and Barnum before him, and Shakespeare’s Antony before them. To Malcolm it all reflects on the shameful gullibility of mankind and the amorality of language, which should be at least logically pure, if also, unfortunately, anybody’s strumpet otherwise.

I have pleaded with Malcolm about the right of language to an occasional holiday—to have a bit of fun. He admits the pleasure of a good pun—not a false or missed pun, or a too obvious, witless pun, but one that activates a mental Leyden jar. But he feels uncomfortable with the imitative uses of language, which often seem primitive and trivial. Ono-matopeias, especially—the old “bow-wow theory” of language origin—it is too obvious and too limited: oral noises, not language. Even when they become conventionalized, echoic words are suspect. They are baby talk, purely animal. They are not language until they are elaborated, until they develop rules, system. I do not think Malcolm has ever seen a small child break the single-word language barrier and get hold of syntax, a fundamental breakthrough in language learning. He favors a sort of Athenian approach: language bursts full-armored from the brow of Jove.

He should follow a child’s language learning, not sternly but curiously. It might impress him to hear the child regularize our odd plurals, with mans and gooses and lifes, a sub-rule which he has to swallow willy-nilly. And children’s imitative words and the noises they make, the words they invent as they play with their vocal apparatus and explore the possibilities of the language. Not children alone, but adults rolling on their tongues such wondrous inventions as discombobulate and goloptious and humongous—fun-words for special occasions, word play. “If all the world were playing holidays,” Malcolm quotes, and blows the umpire’s whistle. He enjoys enforcing rules: “you do not have a game without rules.” I agree, and add that rules have to be revised from time to time, not always on grounds of theory, but of experience learned in play. The thing to avoid is rigidity. Malcolm sniffs and tilts his chin.

Malcolm bears with my frivolous ways, for we have been friends for many years. I find myself inventing words from time to time and even getting them into print when they slip past weary or tolerant copy-editors, perhaps even on their merits. Obviable is one of these beauties, and brainworm is another. I know I made them up all new, though lexicographers might already have registered them. They just seem to come out naturally to fill a place where nothing else would quite do. I have not boasted of them to Malcolm but perhaps I should set up a subtle test—slip them over on him, not as mine, and see the effect. One might pass on the flavor of Latinism. But I shall never risk any syntactic experiments on him. Not even Shakespeare’s “renown and grace is dead” or “that cannot be so neither” would get by. Nor Milton’s “airy tongues that syllable men’s names.” I can hear him declaring firmly, “Nouns are nouns and should not be wrenched into verbs.” Southey’s “now no respite, neither by day nor night,” Johnson’s “neither search nor labour are necessary,” Chesterfield’s “others speak so fast and sputter that they are not to be fully understood neither”—are all blunders. They flout logic. Jefferson’s claim of unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence is, to Malcolm, an egregious example of miscegenation, where a Latin word is joined to an Anglo-Saxon prefix. The fact that unalienable had existed alongside inalienable for over a century is no excuse. I quote Milton’s “Alas, what boots it with uncessant care….” “Alas, indeed,” says Malcolm.

Some time when Malcolm is in a lugubrious mood and we are telling sad stories of the death of kings, I am going to propose, for his tombstone, “English, with all thy faults, I loved thee still.” For mine I can imagine him coming up with something like, “A good man, apart from his too easy tolerance.”

Word Watchers: Fitzedward Hall

Richard W. Bailey, The University of Michigan

Fitzedward Hall (1825-1901) traced his career as an etymologist to a shipwreck. Son of a prosperous lawyer in Troy, New York, Hall completed his studies in engineering at Rensselaer in 1842 and was about to graduate a second time—from Harvard College in 1846—when his father sent him on an errand. A younger brother, inexplicably drawn by Dana’s grim novel Two Years before the Mast (1840), had run away to a life of adventure at sea, and their father ordered Fitzedward to bring him home.

Soon thereafter, Hall found himself a castaway at the mouth of the Ganges, and he chose to remain, first in Calcutta, where he became a journalist and teacher. Drawn to the study of Indian languages, he rose to professor of Sanskrit at Government College, Benares, in 1850, and commenced a career as editor and publisher of Sanskrit texts, the first American to do so. In 1857, he took an armed part in the suppression of the Sepoy uprising and then rewarded himself with a vacation in America and Europe. While he was in the United States, William Dwight Whitney, America’s preeminent orientalist, did all that he could to persuade Hall to remain at home, but he could not prevail. On his way back to India, Oxford awarded Hall an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contribution to oriental learning.

In 1862, Hall left India to spend the rest of his life in England. Whitney’s campaign to find him an appointment at Harvard continued but with diminished chances of success. In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton—like Hall and Francis James Child, a member of the class of ‘46—Whitney wrote resignedly, “Anyhow, one takes a kind of wicked satisfaction in seeing that England has to come even to America for her scholars in that department of Oriental study which it is most her duty and interest to cultivate.” On settling at last in London, Hall was appointed professor of Sanskrit, Hindi, and Indian jurisprudence at King’s College, London. In short order, he was made librarian of the Indian office and examiner in Indian languages for the Civil Service Commissioners. He continued the duties of examiner even after his retirement in 1869 to Marlesford, Suffolk, when he completed his Sanskrit editing. (Belatedly, in 1895, Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate and was rewarded by the bequest of his Indian manuscripts and editions.)

Hall’s philological career had another side, one of special interest to readers of VERBATIM. “As far back as 1838,” he wrote, “I began the practice, which I have kept up ever since, of desultorily jotting down notes on points of English.” (He was then a mere philological stripling of thirteen.) Not until 1872, however, did he compile these notes into book form, a volume with the splendid title, Recent Exemplifications of False Philology. In it, he attacked vigorously three worthies well-known for their opinions about English—William Savage Landor, Thomas De Quincey, and (lengthily) Richard Grant White. All three were inclined to uninformed etymology or ignorant censure, he alleged. In Modern English (1873), he harassed other self-proclaimed “authorities,” and, in both books, three or four lines of text float above a dense mass of footnotes in tightly set six-point type. By this method, he ensured that no claim would stand without supporting evidence.

Hall’s authority came from his citations, a mass so large that “desultorily” can hardly describe the intensity of his collecting. Before the OED, no one could have easily located examples to dispute him, though Richardson, Johnson (as revised by Todd and Latham), and Webster (as revised by Goodrich) all gave historical usages. Hall was immeasurably better informed than those he criticized, and he recognized that a “trustworthy dictionary” must be founded on examples—“a thing never to be expected, save as the result of extensive cooperation, and judicious subdivision of labour.” Naturally enough, he was soon recruited by James Murray as a collaborator in the preparation of the OED. In the preface to the first volume of that great dictionary, Murray thanked Hall expansively for his “voluntary and gratuitous service”: “Those who are familiar with the pages of his Modern English, his English Adjectives in -able [1877], and his numerous articles and papers on special points of English, know with what an amazing wealth of evidence the author illustrates the history of every word, idiom, or grammatical usage, upon which he touches.” In the preface to volume 5, Murray declared “to the Dictionary his death is an incalculable loss, a loss that would indeed have been irreparable but for the fact that he left directions that all his ms. quotations, references, notes, and memoranda, should be handed over to the Editor, and that we should have the free use of the books in his own extensive library to which these referred.” Hall was similarly generous in opening his collections to Joseph Wright (for the English Dialect Dictionary) and to the workers engaged in the preparation of Whitney’s Century Dictionary.

Like many people, Hall grew increasingly conservative as he aged, but his allegiance to usage as the foundation of judgments about English remained firm. In particular, he was suspicious of language reformers who wished to revive or fabricate “Anglo-Saxon” synonyms for “Latinate” words. Masses of older English, he thought, had no more chance of revival than “water-clocks and tinderboxes.” In a sentence intended to poke fun at the Saxonists, Hall declared: “Our lingual hybridism is ineradicable.” Romantic yearnings for an imaginary past were, to him, anathema, and conservatives of many kinds were early subject to his critical strictures: “The rights of man [the conservative] has gradually grown used, after long years of disquietude, to hear talked of, without apprehension of catalepsy; but you must wait for his son, or for his son’s son, if you would get a candid hearing for the rights of woman.”

Despite his long residence abroad, Hall was self-consciously American and, latterly, all too ready to cede authority to the British in matters of English. Toward the end of his life, he wrote: “If egotism for a moment is pardonable, no false shame deters me from avowing that, though I have lived away from America upwards of forty-six years, I feel, to this hour, in writing English, that I am writing a foreign language, and that, if not incessantly on my guard, I am in peril of stumbling.” What a pained admission from an acknowledge authority on the language— particularly one who had earlier celebrated the revolutionary fervor in the United States that had led, at the end of the 18th century, to “forswearing… supine parrotry.” How different from his declaration at the outset of his career as a philologist: “As regards everything else, so as regards language, the spirit of rigid conservatism operates as a principle of unalloyed evil and mischief.”

Hall’s disputatious style in his many contributions to magazines led him into controversy, and the memorial notices published after his death were often circumspect. In one, a life-long friend declared: “Dr. Hall had all the aggressive confidence of modesty adequately equipped,” a judgment that conceals criticism in praise. Another opined that “his prose was apt to be difficult reading. Had he combined with his vast learning a light and playful style, he would not more effectually have strewn the field with the slain, but he would have made the process as delightful as it was edifying. As it is, his works are a permanent resource against the ignoramus and the charlatan who seek to make the English language into their own likeness.” The Dictionary of American Biography is rather more blunt: “His style was too subject to his own criticism to be natural; it was selfconscious and pedantic.”

Despite their often dry character, Hall’s works bear re-reading, not least because of his refusal to bewail the state of the language: “No unprejudiced person, if he takes the trouble to observe and consider, can soberly maintain, that English is deteriorating.” Yet, above all, Hall raised the standard of discussion on the bulwarks of evidence, and, even when he was captious or carping, he compelled respect. Thus, Ralph Olmsted Williams often engaged Hall in the pages of the Dial and of Modern Language Notes; these exchanges Williams published in Some Questions of Good English (1897), recognizing that with “such an adversary as Dr. Hall” it was difficult to claim victory even when claiming the benefit of the last word. Of course Hall was often dismissed—by the British as a foreigner unworthy to judge English usage and by the Americans as an anglophile and expatriate. But the most serious scholars of the day took him seriously, and, if he did not make uninformed allegations about English impossible, he at least made them subject to the trial of evidence from usage.

Australia and the Environment: the First Fifty Years

W.S. Ramson, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Canberra

Australia has recently (in 1988) celebrated its bicentenary. The Australian National Dictionary was published in that year and, for the first time, it has been possible to assemble and describe the set of lexical innovations used in one particular semantic field, that is, the words and meanings of words that register perceptions and utilizations of the Australian environment. I have tried to build my argument not on the over-interpretation of single, apparently key words but on the evidence of the use of those words within a set, within a context of groupings of semantically related words that gain weight and suggest directions of enquiry from their mass. But the problem of over-interpretation remains.

This article is concerned with the first fifty years of settlement, 1788-1838 and begins with the two collocations Crown land and waste land, which sometimes coalesce in the uniquely Australian waste lands of the Crown. Crown land is used (as it has been in Canadian English) of land that is either inalienable or unalienated, of land that is either reserved for the purposes of the Crown or the Crown’s agents or held in the name of the Crown. In the former sense it gives way to government land or to more specific terms for parcels of land like government domain, government farm, government garden, government ground, government paddock, government reserve and government run; in the latter it comes increasingly to refer to land that is available for grant, lease, or purchase, to distinguish land which is variously described as unlocated, unoccupied or (from slightly later, in the 1840s) unsettled from land which is located or settled. Waste land is used (as it had been in American English and, later, in New Zealand English) to distinguish unused land—uncultivated because unoccupied land—from land under cultivation or in some way improved as pasture. It is thus synonymous with wild land (also so used in American English) or with the apparently contradictory wild government ground described in 1849 as “covered with trees and grass never used before, except for feeding blackfellows, kangaroos, cattle, horses and sheep.” This description recognizes that as yet unalienated land might have been used as wild pasture, just as an 1867 critic of bureaucratese can complain that “the ‘Crown lands’ are very frequently, in Government phrase, styled ‘the waste lands of the Crown’… [though] they cannot… with propriety be called waste lands, for they are applied to the only purpose, speaking of them in general, to which they can ever be applied—grazing.”¹

European arrival in these waste lands was described in terms of settlement and location. Both are very much terms of occupation. Settlement is used in 1788 of the British community as established or founded in the colony, in 1792 of a small town, or place where people have “settled” or established themselves. The verb settle is used transitively of the action of peopling a place, as in “to settle a district,” intransitively of the action of settling oneself, as in “to settle in the colony.” By 1803 the unoccupied land is so designated and before 1820 the settled districts or settled lands are so identified. Settler, from 1788, was roughly synonymous with colonist: I say “roughly” because W.H. Breton, in 1833, distinguishes between settlers “the farmers only” and colonists “the whole of the free inhabitants,” though this may be an academic distinction as John Dunmore Lang in the next year remarks “that spirit of irreconcilable enmity to standing timber… almost uniformly evinced by all Australian colonists.” The point is that, settlers or colonists, they had come to occupy land and through occupation to utilize it. Location is more difficult, because its sense history in American English is complex; but in the Australian usage of the 1788-1838 period it meant either ‘an allocation or grant of land’ or ‘the act of establishing a settler in a place,’ in which case it was synonymous with settlement, as in the country will shortly be thrown open to general location. To locate meant, similarly, to ‘allocate (a parcel of land),’ to ‘settle (oneself) on a piece of land,’ or to ‘select (a piece of land).’ Located districts was synonymous with settled districts, the limits of location (or boundaries or bounds) the further extent of settlement, the boundary within which land was surveyed and available for legal tenure, the border, as it was also known. The business of allocating land within the limits of location required land agents, a Land Board, Land Commissioner, land fund, land orders, and led (as early as 1809) to land-jobbing and speculation by land-jobbers and land-sharks.

There was a continuing expansion into new country, new districts, new settlements as land was taken up, opened up or, as the pace grew, thrown open (1830). Movement towards the interior was movement up the country (from as early as 1805) or into the back country; movement towards the settled districts was movement down the country or in: travelers came in from the bush as they can now come in to a station, though out, except in collocations like outdistrict, outfarm, outsettler, outsettlement, belongs to a later period. Squatter, not in the American and earliest Australian sense of ‘one who illegally occupies land’ but in the main Australian sense of ‘one who has title to a tract of grazing land,’ is recorded in 1837 and is essentially a word of the 1840s; but in the earlier period both runs and stations were being established for the grazing of sheep and cattle. From 1804 a person so engaged, as distinct from one who farmed crops—who engaged in agricultural pursuits—was known as a grazier, and from the 1820s such a person occupied a property (with the clear connotation of ownership).

Words which through their coinage reflect the utilization of the land give some measure of the “environmental impact” —if I may use an anachronism. A group of words reflects the immediate needs of an isolated settlement seeking self-sufficiency: dairy station, farm, farming (restricted to crop-raising) farm-station, stockholder, stock-keeper, stockman, stock owner, stock pen, and stock yard. A group reflects the use made of local resources. Two examples are Mount Pitt bird and mutton bird. Of the first Philip Gidley King wrote in 1794: “The Mount Pit Birds are as Numerous as ever, Notwithstanding upwards of Two Hundred thousand have been killed Yearly.” (The name is now obsolete and the bird breeds only on Lord Howe Island.) As to mutton bird, tastes vary: it may have required as W.H. Leigh wrote in 1839 “a desperate stomach to attack such an oily mass,” but Ralph Clarke in 1790 lovingly packed a box for his “beloved woman, Containing a Mount Pit Bird, A Mutton Bird.” More demonstrative are the uses of the kangaroo, as evidenced by kangaroo dog, kangaroo flesh, kangaroo hide, kangaroo hunt, kangaroo leather, kangaroo rug, kangaroo skin, kangaroo soup, kangaroo steak, kangaroo steamer, kangaroo stew, kangaroo tail, kangaroo tail soup; of bark, as in bark chopper, bark mill, bark stripper; of cedar, as in cedar brush, cedar cutter, cedar grounds, cedar party. But a much larger grouping of coinages bears witnesses to the embryonic pastoral industry: cattle walk, cattle hunting, cattle run, cattle station; stock agent, stock driver, stock establishment, stock horse, stock house, stock hut, stock proprietor, stock property, stock run, stock station; sheep country, sheep downs, sheep establishment, sheep hills, sheep holder, sheep land, sheep master, sheep overseer, sheep owner, sheep proprietor, sheep watchman, sheep yard.

The words listed so far are those of occupation and use: what remains to identify in the early period is an indication of the perception of the landscape on which the settlers were imposing themselves and their industry. From the start there was a tension between resemblance and difference, between recollection of the old world and recognition of the new. On the one hand there were names which were qualified before being applied, like wild currant, wild fig, wild geranium, wild indigo, wild parsnip, wild spinach, wild yam; or native flax, nabox, native cherry, native cranberry, native flax, native grass, native myrtle, native parsley, native plum; or names in which the qualifier is a color, as in blue gum, green wattle, white honeysuckle. On the other there were new names, borrowings from Aboriginal languages, like boobook, dingo, koala, kurrajong, wallaby, wallaroo, waratah, and wombat, all from Dharuk (the Sydney language); descriptive names like blackbutt, bottlebrush, duckbill, flooded gum, and gumtree; or popular adoptions of scientific names like banksia, callistemon, casuarina, boronia, eucalyptus, and platypus. In generic terms this is manifested in the replacement of woods by bush, once the inadequacy of woods is recognized, and by the redefinition of words like forest and plain. The important contrast is between the bush ‘vegetation in its natural state, country covered in such vegetation,’ and brush and scrub as subsets of bush on the one hand, and, on the other, country that is naturally open or that has been cleared, an activity which gave the language to burn off as well as short-lived collocations like clearing gang, clearing lease, and clearing party. Forest is redefined, as in an 1805 description of forest land as “such as abounds with Grass and is the only Ground which is fit to Graze; according to the local distinction, the Grass is the discriminating Character and not the Trees, for by making use of the Former, it is clearly understood as different from a Brush or Scrub.” Plain is also redefined, being applied to undulating as well as flat country and admitting the presence of trees or stands of trees. The important feature is openness, as in collocations like open forest, open forest country, and open forest land.

Availability of water is obviously important: the Anglo-Indian tank (as in the name of the Tank Stream) is there from 1791; lagoon used, as in American English, of fresh water as well as salt from 1797; pond as in chain of ponds from 1799; waterhole from 1817. The value of a river frontage was recognized, land distant from water being known as back country. In from the coast ranges of mountains, tiers as they were known in Tasmania and later South Australia—in both cases a specific use of a word meaning ‘line or series’—supplied an impediment just as, on a more local scale, flat implied a usable river “plain,” gully or razorback an obstruction to land use or to movement. The hot wind that blew from the interior, later to be named the sirocco, was known with vivid simplicity as the hot wind.

The point is that in the first fifty-year segment, the lexical landscape is one of occupation and subsistence rather than exploration: it is utilitarian rather than interpretive. It registers a process of improvement, improve being an originally American usage, Australian from the 1830s, referring to the bringing of land into agricultural or pastoral use, and including clearing, the provision of fences, buildings, etc., with the intention of increasing the land’s productivity. Despite that—or because of it—another Americanism which came into Australian use in the 1830s was overstock. One will have noticed that there has been no reference to the indigenous inhabitants— the Indians, natives, Papuans, Blacks, or Aborigines, as they were variously named. That is not because their presence had made no impact on English, for more than fifty words were borrowed from Dharuk, most of them in the early period. These did include gunyah and gibber-gunyah, which recognized that they had places of habitation, also given the English names of breakweathers, or breakwinds, or known as huts. But the only words which imply some sort of relationship, either of location or utilization, between the Aborigines and the land are hunting ground (it being observed in 1830 that “the Natives are as tenacious of their hunting grounds as settlers are of their farms”), the verb to fire, used with reference to the Aboriginal practice of setting fire to a tract of vegetation either to trap animals or to maintain grassland, and run and station. Both of the last were used in the 1820s of land recognized as being occupied by an Aboriginal community, in contexts that acknowledge the existence of tribal boundaries. Run continued to be used in this sense (as late as 1909), but station came increasingly to mean an establishment rather than an area and, in this application, to equate with mission station or a reserve set aside by a government agency (later native reserve, and later still Aboriginal reserve).

---

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Sheep Dip, An 8 year old pure Malt Scotch Whisky much enjoyed by the villagers of Oldbury-on-Severn.” [From >an advertisement in The Sunday Times, October 90: 1:2]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Other cities around the nation will sponsor crime prevention awareness activities tonight, but not Olean. Candlelight marches, children’s activities and block parties will take place as neighbors unite to speak out against crime prevention across the country.” [From the Olean Times Herald, 7 August 1990. Submitted by Judith Hansen, Olean, New York.]

People of the Books: Biographical Entries in Dictionaries

Robert Ilson, London

Not all dictionaries enter the names of real people, but many do. Among English-language monolingual dictionaries, the practice is widespread in America and reviving in Britain. A very recent development, of British origin, is the addition of names to monolingual dictionaries of English as a Second Language [ESL], such as the new “encyclopedic edition” of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (1992).

Pronunciation dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries typically enter names, too. But the purpose of such entries is linguistic rather than encyclopedic: they are there to show how they are pronounced or how their form differs in different languages:

Cicero… Cicerón. Mary… ˜Queen of Scots, ˜ Stuart María Estuardo.

—Collins Spanish Dictionary (1988)

Now and then, however, even bilingual dictionaries enter names for their content rather than for their form. Mondadori’s Pocket Italian-English English-Italian Dictionary (1959) attempts to introduce its Anglophone users to the glories of Italian civilization by entering the names of some of its avatars and describing their achievements in English:

Cimabue, Giovanni, early Florentine painter (1240?-1302?).

Goldoni, Carlo, the greatest Italian dramatist and writer of comedies (in Venetian dialect) (1707-1793).

Mondadori, Arnoldo, leading Italian publisher (1889- ).

This last array prompts the question: how are names chosen for inclusion?

Other items (cat, the, kick the bucket) are sometimes selected from a corpus of language in use. Items that appear frequently in sources of different types are included; items less frequent or more restricted in their distribution are kept out. Not all dictionaries use such objective evidence. Many— perhaps most—still rely on the subjective judgment of the lexicographers who compile them, aided often by a judicious perusal of what other dictionaries include. Where names are concerned, I know of no dictionary in any language whose selection was made from a corpus: all rely on the assessment of lexicographers.

Which names are deemed worthy of inclusion? Let me examine five dictionaries with names in them: Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983) [W9] 1983; Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991) [RHWCD]; The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition (1992) [AHD3]; Collins English Dictionary, 3rd edition (1991) [CED3]; and, for good measure, an ancient Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré (1958) [PL]. The first three are American; the fourth, British; the fifth, French. All five enter Cicero/Cicéron, Cimabue, Goldoni, and Mary/Marie Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots), but not Mondadori. For a finer-grained investigation my starting-point will be the surname Robinson, where I find the following names:

Robinson:

Name	W9	RHWCD	AHD3	CED3	PL
Edward G. (US actor)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Edward Arlington (US poet)	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Esmé Stuart Lennox (Fr Playwright)	No	No	Yes	No	No
George Frederick Samuel (UK statesman)	Yes	No	No	No	No
William Heath (UK cartoonist)	No	No	No	Yes	No
Jack Roosevelt (US baseball player)	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
James Harvey (US historian)	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
John Arthur Thomas (UK theologian)	No	No	No	Yes	No
Mary (Fr President)	No	No	No	Yes	No
Robert (UK chemist)	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes
Smokey (US singer-songwriter)	No	No	No	Yes	No
Sugar Ray (US Boxer)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
12	4	3	7	7	1

Startlingly, of these 12 Robinsons no single one is enshrined in all five dictionaries! Of the 12, six are American; four, English; two, Irish. But as can be seen from the table above, only W9 has, and only CED3 approaches, parity between American and non-American Robinsons.

So to check these dictionaries for national bias, I looked at a few minimal pairs: pairs of people who seemed to play similar roles on their respective sides of the Atlantic: suffragettes, birth-controllers, popular advocates of self-reliance, and engineers:

Minimal Pairs:

Name	W9	RHWCD	AHD3	CED3	PL
Anthony, Susan B.	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Pankhurst, Emmiline (or Christabel or Sylvia) (E,C,S)	Yes (E)	Yes (E)	Yes (E)	Yes	No
Sanger, Margaret	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Stopes, Marie	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Alger, Horatio	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Smiles, Samuel	No	No	No	Yes	No
Fulton, Robert	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Brunel, Mare Isambard (or Isambard Kingdom) (both) (both)	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
8	5	5	6	7	2

It is pretty clear that the British CED3 takes more account of American names than do the American dictionaries of British ones. This is hardly surprising, as British dictionaries do a better job with American English generally than American dictionaries do with British English.

But encyclopedic dictionaries (though not, perhaps, ESL ones) are supposed to include important names from all over the world. So to examine cultural bias in a wider sense, I checked the surname Lambert, happily borne by Anglophones as well as Francophones. Here is what I found:

Lambert:

Name	W9	RHWCD	AHD3	CED3	PL
Michel (ca. 1610-1696: French composer)	No	No	No	No	Yes
John (1619-1683: English general)	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Anne-Thérèse (1647-1733: French writer)	No	No	No	No	Yes
Johann Heinrich (1728-1777: German scientist)	No	No	No	No	Yes
Constant (1905-1951: English composer)	No	No	No	Yes	No
5	1	0	0	1	4

If the French dictionary was weak on Robinsons, the British and American dictionaries are at least as weak on Lamberts. The pedagogical pretensions of encyclopedic dictionaries must be taken with a grain of salt, though their skewing may be a fair reflection of the limited knowledge that speech communities have of the worthies of whom other speech communities boast. And the German Lambert, though unworthy of a biographical entry of his own in the four Anglophone dictionaries, is remembered nevertheless in their etymologies of the scientific unit, the lambert, that bears his name.

Having somehow selected the names to be included, lexicographers must set about explaining them. But how? The mere indication of the dates and places of birth and death will usually suffice to identify the bearer of a name uniquely; if one goes further, where does one stop? Dictionaries seem to divide into two camps. Some say the minimum, limiting themselves typically to “birth and death dates, nationality, and occupation or status” [W9]. Others attempt more, need more space, and run risks. Two examples will show the problems:

Cornwallis, Charles

…1738-1805… Brit. general and statesman. [W9]

…1738-1805. British general and statesman. [RHWCD]

…1738-1805. British military and political leader who commanded forces in North Carolina during the American Revolution. His surrender at Yorktown in 1781 marked the final British defeat. [AHD3]

…1738-1805, British general in the War of American Independence: commanded forces defeated at Yorktown (1781): defeated Tipu Sahib (1791): governor general of India (1786-93, 1805): negotiated the Treaty of Amiens (1801). [CED3]

…, général anglais, né à Londres (1738-1805). Il capitula à Yorktown pendant la guerre d’Amérique (1781), soumit Tippo-Sahib (1792); vice-roi d’Irlande, il réprima la rébellion de 1798. [PL]

…, English general, born London (1738-1805). He surrendered at Yorktown during the American War of Independence (1781), subdued Tipu Sultan (1792); as viceroy of Ireland, he suppressed the rebellion of 1798.

To Americans, Cornwallis was History (i.e., irrelevant) after Yorktown. Not so to the British, Indians, Irish, and French; though it is no less interesting to not the different emphases of the British CED (Treaty of Amiens—a truce in the Napoleonic wars—but no Ireland) and the French PL (Ireland and the bloodily suppressed ‘rébellion de 1798’ but no Amiens).

Britten, Benjamin

…1913-1976… Eng. composer. [W9]

…1913-76, English composer and pianist. [RHWCD]

… 1913-1976. British composer known for his song cycles, such as Les Illuminations (1939), and operas, including Peter Grimes (1945) and Death in Venice (1973). [AHD3]

…1913-76, English composer, pianist, and conductor. His works include the operas Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951), the choral works Hymn to St Cecilia (1942) and A War Requiem (1962), and numerous orchestral pieces. [CED3]

[no entry in PL]

What was Britten’s “occupation or status”? Composer only? Composer and pianist? Composer, pianist, and conductor? What, indeed, was his “nationality”: “English” or “British”? (Cornwallis is unequivocally “British” to everyone but the French.) And which of Britten’s many works deserve mention—besides Peter Grimes? I suspect that what Britten is “known for” most of all is A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra; but perhaps music for children does not count for much in dictionaries for grown-ups.

With ordinary words and phrases in dictionaries, the criteria for including them and the criteria for explaining them are independent in principle. Cat gets in because of the frequency and range of its occurrences (determined objectively or subjectively). What the dictionary says about cat has then to be decided.

With names in dictionaries, the criteria for inclusion and the criteria for explanation are inextricably interdependent. Britten, Cornwallis, and all the rest get in not because of their abundant presence in texts, but because lexicographers feel that the bearers of these names are important folk. And the explanations the lexicographers proceed to provide for the names are explicit attempts to justify their inclusion. What is thus characteristic of such encyclopedic entries is true of all the entries in encyclopedias. In other words, an encyclopedia is an enormous exercise in self-justification.

Verbal Aggression in The Wizard of Oz

Reinhold Aman, Santa Rosa, California

Most North Americans and many others worldwide have watched the movie classic The Wizard of Oz many times, either as children or later with their children. Yet few viewers are aware of the considerable amount of negative language in that children’s movie. There are some ninety occurrences of name-calling, insults, taunts, threats, self-deprecation, harsh commands, scolding, sarcastic remarks, and other verbal aggression in that film. Unless one’s ears are tuned to listen for verbal aggression, one simply does not notice most negative language. This holds true for The Wizard of Oz, too; certainly most of it has escaped the attention of most people, even though they might have watched the annual television showing for decades.

L[yman] Frank Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), is quite different from the film version, not only in content but also in language. For the book’s text, I consulted The Wizard of Oz, edited by Michael Hearn (1983); for the movie, The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay, edited by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf (1989).

Most of the aggression and verbal abuse appear only in the movie but not in the book. Among the book’s few maledicta—mild and colorless ones at that—are: You are nothing but a big coward! (Dorothey to the Lion, 36), This Lion is a coward. (Scarecrow to the Queen of the Field Mice, 53), You are a wicked creature! (Dorothy to the Wicked Witch, 83), You are a humbug! (Scarecrow to the Wizard, 97), and I think you are a very bad man! (Dorothy to the Wizard, 100). The movie, with its alliterative abuse, name-calling, taunts, shouting and yelling, threats, scolding, and nasty sarcasm is much livelier and much scarier for children than the book. To be sure, by today’s standards, the film’s most often used epithet, fool is quite harmless; but such timeless pearls as You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk! are as effective and amusing today as they were fifty years ago.

Actually, much of the verbal nastiness in the film is not expressed by nasty terms but by the tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and other paralingual means. The Wicked Witch, especially, uses terms of endearment (my little pretty, my fine gentlemen) when addressing others; but her menacing face and gestures, her vicious sarcasm, her screaming laughter, and her saccharine voice while uttering those polite-sounding addresses and scary death-threats are much more effective and nasty than simple name-calling would be.

Space limitations preclude more than a sampling of the citations. The following are arranged chronologically:

… and chases her nasty old cat every day. (Dorothy in the barnyard of the Gale farm, to Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, about her dog Toto and Miss Gulch, who hates the dog.)

You ain’t using your head…. Think you didn’t have any brains at all! (Farmhand Hunk to Dorothy in the barnyard, advising her not to walk past Miss Gulch’s place with Toto.)

Are you going to let that old Gulch heifer try and buffalo you? (Zeke to Dorothy.)

Then the next time she squawks, walk right up to her and spit in her eye! (Zeke to Dorothy about Miss Gulch.)

What’s all this jabber-wapping when there’s work to be done? I know three shiftless farmhands that’ll be out of a job before they know it. (Auntie Em to her three farmhands, Hickory, Hunk, and Zeke, who are idly standing around.)

You wicked old witch! (Dorothy wildly to Miss Gulch who wants her to put Toto into the Basket.)

For twenty-three years I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you… and now … well—being a Christian woman—I can’t say it! (Auntie Em to Miss Gulch who is taking Toto to the sheriff.)

Doggone it! Hick! (Uncle Henry at his farm to Hickory, who is working on his wind machine. Henry uses a euphemism for Goddamn it!).

Only bad witches are ugly. (Glinda correcting Dorothy.)

The wicked old witch at last is dead! (Glinda, Dorothy, and the Munchkins about the Wicked Witch of the East killed by Dorothy’s house that fell on her.)

Ding Dong! The wicked witch is dead! (The Munchkins singing.)

She is worse than the other one was. (Glinda to Dorothy, about the Wicked Witch of the West and her dead sister, the Wicked Witch of the East.)

Oh, ho-ho, rubbish!… Be gone before somebody drops a house on you, too! (Glinda threatening the Wicked Witch.)

I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too! (The Witch threatening Dorothy and Toto, before departing from Munchkinland.)

I haven’t got a brain—only straw. (The Scarecrow self-deprecatingly to Dorothy.)

But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they? (The Scarecrow to Dorothy.)

What do you think you’re doing? (The Apple Tree barking at Dorothy who wants to pick an apple off him, in the forest.)

… you don’t want any of those apples! (The Scarecrow taunting the Apple Tree, so that he will pelt them with his apples.)

Well, stay away from her! Or I’ll stuff a mattress with you! (The Witch threatening the Scarecrow.)

And you! I’ll use you for a beehive! (The Witch threatening the Tin Man.)

How long can ya stay fresh in that can? (The Cowardly Lion taunting the Tin Man, upon meeting him, Dorothy, and the Scarecrow in the forest.)

Get up and fight, ya shiverin’ junkyard! (The Lion taunting the Tin Man.)

Put ya hands up, ya lopsided bag of hay! (The Lion taunting the Scarecrow.)

…why, you’re nothing but a great big coward! (Dorothy to the sobbing Lion.)

You’re right, I am a coward! (The Lion self-deprecatingly to Dorothy.)

Curse it! Curse it! Somebody always helps that girl! (The Witch to herself and Nikko, the Winged Chimpanzee, seeing Dorothy in the crystal ball waking up in the poppy field, after Glinda let it snow.)

Who rang that bell? Can’t you read? (The irate Emerald City doorman—referring to the sign BELL OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE KNOCK—fiercely yelling at Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion after they rang the bell.)

Jiminy Crickets! (Dorothy responding to the Wizard’s booming Silence! She utters a euphemism for Jesus Christ!)

You dare to come to me for a heart—do you? You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk! (The angry Wizard yelling at the Tin Man, who wanted a heart.)

And you, Scarecrow, have the effrontery to ask for a brain? You billowing bale of bovine fodder ! (The irate Wizard yelling at the Scarecrow, who wanted a brain.)

Silence, whippersnapper! (The Wizard angrily responding to Dorothy.)

Throw that basket in the river and drown him! (The Witch savagely to Nikko, referring to Toto in the basket, after Dorothy refused to give her the ruby slippers.)

Fool that I am! I should have remembered! (The Witch self-deprecatingly, after she touched the ruby slippers and burned herself.)

Catch him, you fool! (The Witch to Nikko, after Toto escaped from the Witch’s basket.)

Drat you and your dog! (The Witch cursing Dorothy after Toto got away. She uses a euphemism for damn!)

I’ll tear' em apart! (The Lion to the Scarecrow and the Tin Man on the rocky hillside, referring to the Winkies who are marching on the Witch’s castle.)

Seize them! Stop them, you fools! (The Witch shrieking at her Guards after the Scarecrow and the Tin Man dropped a huge chandelier on many of them, and the four are running away.)

Well, the last to go will see the first three go before her… and her mangy little dog, too! (The Witch threatening the five with death.)

You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! (The Witch shouting at Dorothy, who has just thrown water on the burning Scarecrow and accidentally splashed the Witch, who is now melting and dying.)

Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz? You ungrateful creatures! (The Wizard angrily to the four, after they returned to him with the Witch’s broom and taunted him to keep his promise, if he were indeed “really great and powerful.”)

You humbug! (The Scarecrow indignantly to the Wizard after they discovered that he was just a man behind a curtain.)

Yes, yes, yes, exactly so. I’m a humbug. (The Wizard self-deprecatingly to the three, admitting his fraud.)

Oh, you’re a very bad man! (Dorothy scolding the Wizard, after he admitted he was a fraud.)

Oh, no, my dear. I’m a very good man—I’m just a very bad Wizard. (Self-deprecatory admission and defense by the Wizard to the three and Toto.)

Mottoes from Zetland

Bel Bailey, Essex

Until 1974, Shetland was officially known as Zetland, a name more suggestive of its fascinating and ancient history. The Viking invasion of the eighth and ninth centuries gave a strong practical bias to the earlier existing Celtic culture, and many Norse words remain in the dialect. These give an arresting piquancy to the many proverbs still surviving in Shetland.

Most of these are crisp and pithy in the extreme, with an admirable precision of thought. A native caution is typical of many, like Better da ill kent [‘known’] as da guid untried, which roughly parallels the old saying “Better the devil you know…' but expressed rather more forcefully.

Dere few rodds at doesna hae a mirae at da end o him sums up the realism (even cynicism) of the Shetlander and more wariness still in Never hüve oot [‘throw out’] dirty water till da clean be in! Amusingly this represents a caution against burning one’s boats unless one is sure of a safe exit.

Exasperation with the young is a topic in many of these proverbs. The sore feelings of a harassed parent bringing up mischievous boys might be soothed by the Shetland motto Mony a pellit [‘troublesome’] foal haes made a good horse or Dere broken pots in aa lands, as a reminder that the problem is universal.

Yet overindulgence of the young was firmly checked by the reminder that It’s late time to sift when da sids [‘chaff’] is ida bread,' meaning discipline is only effective when started at an early age.

Love, courtship, and marriage, as might be expected, called forth more gems of wisdom. Too sudden and ardent a romance was typically greeted by head shaking among the elders who had seen it all before. Cald is da kale at cøls ida plate, an cald is da love at starts ower haet ‘Cold is the kale that cools on the plate and cold is the love that starts over hot.’

Spinsters were consoled by the proverb Better lang lowse daa ill teddered, and a grieving jilted girl was advised by the motto, Better ee hert braks dan aa da wirld winders, warning her not to show her feelings too strongly.

More cheerful was the proverb A bonny bride is shŭn buskit [‘well dressed’]; but the wedding of two very unattractive people was rather unkindly summed up as Hairy butter is good enyoch for siddy [‘coarse’] bread!

Such native shrewdness means excellent judgment of character and more Shetland proverbs echo this. The hypocrite was neatly described as Hit’s ill for da kettle crook tae ca da kettle black, while ‘Caff [‘chaff’] aye flees heicher [‘flies higher’] dan guid coarn summed up a false friend who deserts one in trouble. trouble.

True comradeship, however, is not forgotten. A friend ida wye is better dan a penny ida pocket, but neighbor problems call forth, Yer can win by aa yer kin, bit by yer neebir ye canna win. As for the damage caused by gossip, Ill news is lack a fitless heddercowe, a witty warning that tittle tattle can travel like a rootless clump of heather!

The sheer toil experienced by most Shetlanders is another source of proverbs: Every man’s back is shapit for his ain burden; and A moothful is as guid as a belly fu firmly reminds of the days of real want.

Grit is advised rather than brooding in hard times. Glowerin ida lum [‘by the chimney’] never filled da pot. As for time of plenty coming rapidly after scarcity, watch out for Lang want is nae maet hainin.

Sadly the special motto of the crofter-fisherman concerns the hardship caused by lack of funds for investment. Da riven [‘torn’] sleeve hauds de haund back. Naturally, the lack of ready funds holds one back from vital purchase of an improved farm implement or even a fishing vessel.

Many of these ancient proverbs would provide excellent New Year’s resolutions, but perhaps the best of them advises us to live one day at a time without so much worrying: It’s a guid day at pitts aff da nicht! It will be interesting to see if any new proverbs will be invented in Shetland concerning North Sea oil and the welcome novelty of its young people now able to make a living at home. A new awareness of rich history and tradition of belonging to “The Old Rock” plus caution concerning any threat to the native environment now provide much food for thought and material for pungent new Shetland proverbs.

Front Back-axle

Alex Berlyne, Jerusalem

Playing the dying King David in an otherwise forgettable 1985 movie, Richard Gere was short of both breath and temper.

“Must you record my every word?” he gasped when he spotted a courtier making notes.

“It’s for the Book of Samuel, Lord.”

Even without the dubious contributions of Cecil B.De Mille or, in this case, Richard Beresford, there are enough ludicrous misconceptions about the Bible in circulation. One of them, based on vague memories of the Elizabethan English of the Authorized Version (albeit much of its language was borrowed from Tyndale’s 16th-century translation), is that Classical Hebrew tends to be long-winded and is overloaded with the equivalents of “peradventure,” “verily,” and “Does it find favor in my Lord’s sight?”

The considerable number of italicized words sprinkled throughout every page of the Bible provides a clue, usually overlooked, that the original is not to blame. Classical Hebrew dispenses with some parts of speech that are necessary in English, so, in the 17th century, King James’s “learned men to the number of four and fifty” simply added those that were required to make sense of the translation, printing them in italics.

Unfortunately, typographical convention employs italics for emphasis. I recall my old headmaster was-ing and is-ing at the top of his lungs as he read the Lesson every morning to 1,200 uncomprehending Manchester schoolboys. “Behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron,” Dr. Cheney would thunder, “Is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon.” He would then add insult to injury by frequently reminding us that “English is the language of Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible.” I had had enough of the original Bible literally knocked into me by a rebbe, an old-fashioned Hebrew-teacher, to know that the voice that breath’d over Eden was not the one that read the news on the BBC.

The Word according to Cheney was as eccentric as Charles Laughton’s version of Lear. The actor “believed that a capital letter in Shakespeare’s Folio and Quarto texts indicates emphasis,” Sir Peter Hall wrote. “No amount of pointing out the vagaries of Elizabethan typesetting could shift his conviction. So as King Lear he was left accenting in all the wrong places and fighting for breath.”

Hebrew, I am happy to report, has always tended to an admirable brevity. By 1708, Iohann Buxtors had already published his Abbreviaturis Hebraicis, and the colloquial Hebrew of the sabra, the native-born Israeli, carries on the grand tradition. The result is that everyday speech now resembles Ira Gershwin’s witty lyrics for ‘S ‘Wonderful:

Don’t mind telling you,

In my humble fash,

That you thrill me through

With a tender pash.

This is just the opposite of the current trend in English. Media people, politicians and academics, to paraphrase Gavin Ewart, inflate the language in a way they shouldn’t oughtn’t just to make their pronouncements sound more important. Even the BBC no longer employs two words to describe an institution founded in 1785 but now describes The Times as “The Times newspaper,” as if listeners might otherwise believe that the Times Furnishing Company has taken to analyzing Mr. Major’s foreign policy. An old friend of mine who worked on the Guardian maintains that we ought to be thankful that Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper is no longer with us. Otherwise the BBC would undoubtedly refer to it as the Children’s Newspaper children’s newspaper.

Colloquial Hebrew is excessively economical, and its shortcuts have been further abbreviated by the numerous acronyms used throughout the armed forces. If it were not for the fact that military service is compulsory and most males, at least, do reserve duty until late middle age, civilians and soldiers would be quite unable to understand each other. I once pointed this out to the editors of The Jerusalem Post, Israel’s English-language daily. To reflect Israeli life more accurately, I suggested, they would have to print the news in the same sort of English favored by real-estate agents:

The Is’l govt’s refusl 2 agree 2 PLO attndce be4 renewg the Gen Conf is the most impt elemt stading in te way of a jst & lsting M.E. peace.

Compressed speech is the norm, particularly among sabras. Dash, they cry, telescoping (Drishat) Sh(alom), when they wish you to give someone their regards, followed by Lehit(raot)’ literally ‘au revoir,’ as they bid you farewell. To be fair, Lehit is gradually being pushed out by a foreign importation, ‘Bye.

Even the notorious sabra impudence is frequently expressed in a truncated form. Zabash, they say as they dismiss a subject, Z(u) ba (‘aya) sh(elekha), ‘That’s your problem.’ Little wonder that foreign-born Israelis, especially those who were taught old-world manners, soon learn to parrot another abbreviated sabra expression: they describe the offender as having a Padas Pa(rtsuf) d(oresh) s(tira) ‘a face that invites a slap.’

Rehov Dizengoff, one of Tel Aviv’s main streets, is usually shortened to Dizengoff or even Dizi, which might mislead a tourist into believing it was named after Benjamin Disraeli instead of Meir Dizengoff, the city’s first mayor. This thrift of tongues sometimes gets sabras into trouble when they venture abroad. They confuse their hosts in London, for example, by asking how to get to Oxford when they mean Oxford Street and not the city of dreaming spires. The shopping street, with its branch of Marks and Spencer’s, is more of a magnet for visiting Israelis than Buckingham Palace and Madame Tussaud’s combined.

This sort of mishap is only one of the problems they encounter. Other misunderstandings frequently occur because of an inability to distinguish between the vowels of bit and beet. An Israeli girl who found lodgings in Weech Road, Hampstead, found herself involved in an Abbott and Costello routine every time she went to register as an alien at the local police station. When she was asked for her address, she would answer, “Wich Road.”

“Yes, which road?” the desk sergeant would repeat patiently.

I can’t imagine what the poor copper would have had to say if Hebrew pronouns had cropped up in this comedy routine. The possibilities are endless for who means ‘he’ while, contrariwise, he means ‘she,’ and me signifies ‘who.’

Borrowings from other languages frequently undergo sea changes, but when they are complicated by the tendency of colloquial Hebrew to abbreviate, the results are frequently weird and wonderful. Sealed-beam headlights, for example, were corrupted into Silbim in Hebrew; but -im is the masculine plural suffix for nouns—kibbutz, kibbutzim, for example. The result, not entirely unexpectedly, is that a single headlight is now referred to as a silb. Some borrowings completely mystify the non-Hebrew speaker. It does not take much ingenuity to translate ambrex as ‘handbrakes,’ but the real difficulty arises when a two-part noun is abbreviated and the wrong half, so to speak, is discarded. Kvacker, for example, referring to any kind of porridge, is a truncated form of Quaker Oats, while kottej is cottage cheese and not a quaint little thatched dwelling with roses entwined round the door. The same anarchy reigns in electronics, where tep means ‘tape-recorder’ and not the tape itself. The leisure industry is similarly afflicted: a Kountri is not a state, territory, or nation but a ‘country club.’

There are four things according to the Book of Proverbs that are beyond understanding: “the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.” A fifth that defies comprehension is now the herbrew pony, borrowed from ponytail migrated from the back of the head to the forehead and came to mean ‘bangs’ or ‘fringe.’

Readers who have got this far, may be able to tackle another development without the aid of a diagram: bekex, a simple corruption of back-axle, has been in common usage since the days of the British mandate, for the mechanical expertise of soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, manhandling 30 cwt. trucks over frozen Italian mountain passes in the winter of 1944, soon outstripped their grasp of English. Bekex, as far as they were concerned, meant ‘any azle.’ As a result, it is now necessary to qualify the noun in order to specify which axle is being referred to, so that bekex kidmi means, tout court, ‘front back-axle.’

“Tide-end town, which is Teddington” (or is it?)

Adrian Room, Stamford, Lincolnshire

Leslie Dunkling [XVIII, 4] has his reservations (unfairly, it seems to me) about A.D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-Names. But he could have mentioned a most important function that the book fulfills: that of setting straight the many misapprehensions regarding the origins of English place-names. It is not just that people like a colorful or romantic origin for a name and one that they can readily understand, but that folk etymologies themselves are perpetuated by reference works and guide books normally well regarded for their trustworthiness and authority.

It is they, therefore, as much as anybody, who are to blame for the continuing fiction that Abingdon means ‘town of the abbey,’ that Boston is named for St. Botolph, that Coventry means ‘place of the abbey,’ that the second word of Leighton Buzzard represents French beau désert, that Lichfield means ‘field of the corpses,’ that Maidstone means ‘Medway town,’ that Morpeth means ‘moor path,’ that Redruth means ‘town of the Druids,’ that Southend is so called because it is at the southern end of Essex, that Westminster is a ‘minster’ west of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and so on. At least Mr. Mills lays all these revenants to rest.

Take Coventry, for example, and turn to the general reference books and guides. “Coventre, the Couentrev of Domesday Book, may derive from a convent of the Saxon period” [Blue Guide to England, 1980]; “It probably owes its origin to the erection in the 7th c of an Anglo-Sexon convent” [The New Shell Guide to England, 1981]; “Established under the protection of a Saxon convent in the 7th century” [The New Shell Guide to Britain, 1985]. Yes, they are cautious, and do not explicity derive Coventry from convent, but they do imply that the word is the source of the name.

Boston has long had its name linked with St. Botolph and is explicitly interpreted by the Blue Guide as “St. Botolph’s Town.” The connection is also mentioned in other works, such as Everyman’s Encyclopaedia (1978): “Its name is said to be detived from ‘Botolph’s Town,’ St. Botolph having founded a monastery here in 654.”

But all these origins are either just plain wrong or at any rate highly suspect.

So what do the names mean? Abingdon means ‘Æbba’s hill’; Boston means ‘Bōtwulf’s stone’; Conventry means ‘Cofa’s tree’; Leighton Buzzard is named for the Busard family, who owned land here in the 13th century; Lichfield means ‘open land near Letocetum,' the latter name itself meaning ‘gray wood’; Maidstone probably means ‘stone of the maidens’ (i.e., where the girls gathered); Morpeth, like it or not, means ‘murder path’; Redruth, a Cornish name, means ‘red ford’; Southend arose at the southern end of Prittlewell parish; Westminster is west of the City of London.

How can one be so sure? Because the forms of the names, as they are recorded over the years, tell use so. To put it broadly, we must be guided by language as well as by history or geography. Historic events and geographical attributes themselves frequently serve to promote many of these false etymologies. It cannot be denied that Abingdon arose by an abbey, for example, or that Maidstone is on the Medway. St. Botolph’s church, Boston, is moreover a noted landmark (the “Boston Stump”) is more-can also readily envisage the Bedfordshire countryside around Leighton Buzzard as at one time being a “beautiful wild place.” (The village of Beaudesert Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, has a name that really does mean this.)

Of course, one cannot be one hundred per cent certain about the exact meaning of every name. That is way it is necessary to say “probably” about the meaning of Maidston. But this origin is much more likely than the one first quoted.

Maybe this is the place to shatter a few more illusions, not restricting the names to England, as Mills does, but extending them to include other well-known places in Britain. The pseudo-origins have all been recorded in print, even though some derive from 19th-century gazetteers.

Arundel (West Sussex) does not mean ‘swallow,’ from Old French, but is Old English meaning ‘hoarhound valley,’ from the plant of the nettle family.

Baltimore (Co. Cork, Ireland) does not mean ‘Great house of Baal’ but ‘townland of the big house.’

Bideford (Devon) does not mean ‘by the ford’ but probably ‘ford at the stream called Byd.'

Birmingham (West Midlands), despite the proximity of Castle Bromwich and West Bromwich, and the colloquial form of its name as Brummagem, is not related to those places (meaning ‘farm where broom grows’) but means ‘village of Beorma’s people’ (i.e., his family or followers).

Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) is not named for the Cam. The river is named for the town, and the town’s original name (in modern terms) was Grantabridge. Granta is still an alternative name for the Cam today, especially in academic circles, e.g., for the title for the literary magazine Granta. Cambridge is named in some Old English records as Grantcheste, ‘Roman camp on the Granta.

Chelmsford (Essex), although on the Chelmer, does not take its name from the River but the other way around. Its name means ‘Cēolmæbreve;r’s ford,’ from a personal name.

Daventry (Northamptonshire) does not mean ‘town of two rivers’ or ‘town of the Danes’ but ‘Dafa’s tree.’ It is thus a name along the lines of Coventry.

Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is not so named because it was founded by King Edwin of North-umberland (reigned 617-33). The name is found before his reign and perhaps means ‘fort on a slope.’

Flamborough Head (Humberside) is not so named from the flames of a beacon here. Its name means ‘Fleinn’s stronghold,’ from a personal name.

Gosport (Hampshire) does not have a name meaning ‘God’s port,’ referring to a 12th-century French bishop who took refuge from a storm here. Its name means ‘market town where geese are sold.’

Guildford (Surrey) does not mean ‘ford where golden flowers grow,’ and still less ‘ford of the guild,’ but ‘ford by the hill with golden sands.’

Halifax (West Yorkshire) does not mean ‘holy hair,’ traditionally referring to some martyred maiden, but probably ‘nook of land with coarse grass,’ the first part of the name representing Old English halh (related to modern hole and hollow), and the ‘hair’ in this case being long, straggly grass.

Hythe (Kent) does not have a name related to haven but derives from Old English hyth ‘landing place.’ This despite the similarity of meaning.

Lewes (East Sussex), on the Ouse, does not derive from this river, as if French “L’Ouse.” It may not even represent the plural of Old English hlyw ‘burial mound’ as usually explained. Current thinking is that the name is related to Welsh llechwedd ‘slope, hillside.’

Liverpool (Merseyside) is not named for its fabled ‘liver bird,’ despite the latter’s representation in the city’s coat of arms. Its name means what it says, ‘livered pool,’ i.e., one with muddy or weedy water. (The Red Sea had the former literary name of Livered Sea similarly.)

Oakham (Leicestershire) is not named for its oaks but means ‘Occa’s homestead’ or ‘Occa’s riverside land,’ depending whether the second half of the name represents Old English hām or hamm.

Oxford does not derive its name from nearby Osney despite ecclesiastical links with this place. It means what it says: ‘ford where oxen cross.’ (The alternative origin here was doubtless proposed from the outrageous idea that a venerable university city should have such a rustic name.)

Rutland, the historic county (of which Oakham, above, was the county town), does not mean ‘root land’ or ‘red land’ or even ‘rutted land’ but ‘Rōta’s land,’ from a personal name.

Wallingford (Oxfordshire) does not refer to a ford by an old fortification (Latin vallum) but means ‘ford of Wealth’s people,’ again from a personal name.

Wellington (Shropshire) is not so called from its location on Watling Street. Its name probably means ‘Wēala’s farm’ (i.e., one associated with him in some way).

Westmoreland, the historic county now subsumed into Cumbria, does not have a name meaning ‘west mere land,’ despite its proximity to the Lake District, but ‘west moor land,’ i.e., ‘land of the people living to the west of the moors.’

And while we are about it, London remains an obscure name, despite attempts to interpret it as ‘Londinos’ place,’ from a Celtic personal name said to mean ‘wild one.’ The -don is almost certainly not Old English denu ‘valley’ (as it is in Croydon, ‘wild saffron valley’) or dūn ‘hill’ (as it is in Huntingdon ‘huntsman’s hill’), but probably represents an integral part of some pre-Celtic name. This means that the first part of the name does not mean, as has been variously proposed, from a plethora of languages, ‘lake,’ ‘wood,’ ‘populous,’ ‘plain,’ ‘ship,’ ‘moon,’ among others.

It was Rudyard Kipling, incidentally, who in his poem “The River’s Tale,” promulgated the origin of Teddington in the quotation in the title of this article. True, Teddington is on the Thames, and moreover it is at the upper tidal limit of the river. But the name actually means ‘Tuda’s farm,’ from a personal name. Sorry, folks, but there it is.

In the Name of Revolution

William H. Dougherty, Santa Fe

Revolution does not invariably or even usually have much effect on language. The English Puritan Revolution, or Civil War, in some ways culturally the most radical of social upheavals, so annihilated religious artifacts created in England before it that they are preciously rare today; yet it affected the English language hardly at all, even temporarily. The survival after the American Revolution of such names in the former British colonies in North America as Georgetown, Georgia, and New England evidence that the revolutionary spirit in the future USA had little effect on nomenclature. The same can be said of Mexico, where a few words like Reforma and ejido took on new meanings during and after the Revolution but where, with the exception of some street names, toponyms remained largely unaffected: Guadalupe remained Guadalupe, and Monterrey remained Monterrey.

With the possible exception of the French, who tried changing even the names of the months to memorialize their revolution, the Russians make more of their language than any other people about whose language I know anything. But whereas the changes wrought in French by the French Revolution were canceled by the Thermidorean reaction, in the newly formed and freshly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (more commonly called the USSR or, in Cyrillic, CCCP) wholesale changes of toponyms, following changes of personal names, did not really set in till the Soviet Thermidor brought Stalin to dictatorial power.

In Russia it was not names alone that were changed in the language of the revolutionary country. The alphabet was trimmed of a letter that had become phonetically superfluous, as c has become in English, and the orthography was simplified by the omission of the hard sign after final hard consonants. More subtle effects were introduced through Communist diction. For example, Lenin’s famous definition of Communism, “Communism—that is Soviet rule plus the electrification of the whole country,” with its est’ and plyus strikes me as rather un-Russian, as Communist jargon. And the profusion of acronyms that inundated the Russian language owed much to revolutionary brusqueness. In Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant title for his exposé of Soviet forced-labor camps, Arkhipelag GULag, he exploits the ugliness inherent in one of these acronyms. New terms like apparatchik, kolkhoz, and khozraschet were invented, old words like komissar, soviet, and tovarishch were given new meanings, and some Russian words of both kinds were borrowed into other languages, including English.

Until fairly recently the Latinate Russian term nomenclatura meant about the same thing as in English and other languages. The 1938 edition of the Soviet Tolkovyi Slovar’ Russkogo Yazyka defines nomenclatura as “The totality of appellations employed in any specialization.” No other definition is given. But the noun has acquired a secondary meaning in Russian: ‘the privileged and operative personnel of a Communist party.’ It is with this secondary meaning that the word has been borrowed from Russian into English, as well as into French and other languages.

There is logic in the semantic drift of a derivative of the Latin word for name to mean the ‘top personnel’ in a Communist state. Like Christians joining a religious order, some old Bolsheviks changed their names. The ostensible reason for such name changes was to confuse the tsarist police, but consideration of the root meanings of the names chosen by the revolutionaries reveals that the sobriquets were at least as much noms de guerre as noms de plume or cover names. Ulyanov became Lenin, a name probably suggested by a strike of gold miners on the Lena River. But Ilyich, as Lenin liked to be called, was a relatively modest man—as long as he got his way. Dzhugashvili selected the Russian word for ‘steel,’ stal’, as the root of his revolutionary name, the -in and -ov (-off, -ev) suffixes of Russian surnames being only surname indicators. Rosenfeld turned to Stone (Kamenev), Scriabin to Hammer (Molotov), and Peshkov became Bitter (Gorky). Bronstein, perhaps out of a Jewish sense of irony, provided the exception to prove the rule by borrowing the surname of an Odessa jailer, Trotsky.

Despite all that embalmers and mausoleums can do, people are highly perishable, soon gone from this earth, while cities and geographic sites last longer. So as Ilyich’s body was eternalized in embalming fluids (or duplicated in wax, as some skeptics believe) and displayed much like the relics of saints under an impressive mausoleum in Red Square against the Kremlin wall, the city created by the westernizing tsar and named for himself with a western, German name, Sankt-Peterburg, was renamed Leningrad. Tsaritsyn was renamed for Stalin, -grad being the Russian equivalent of -ton or -burg in English. And other figures in the Soviet pantheon or nomenclatura were likewise immortalized: Samara became Kuibyshev; Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlov; Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk, a derivative of Lenin’s original surname; Nizhnii Novgorod was renamed Gorky; and so on across the map of Russia and to a lesser extent of the USSR.

As far as language, particularly toponymy, is concerned, what has been called the Second Russian Revolution was adumbrated by the recoiling in horror from Stalin and his works that followed Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. Of nine toponyms created to honor Stalin that are listed in the index of a 1954 Soviet atlas not one is included in a 1968 Soviet dictionary of geographic names. But the way in which names were changed in the period of destalinization differed significantly from the reversion to tsarist names in the period of glasnost and perestroika. Stalingrad did not become again Tsaritsyn, nor did Stalin Peak revert to an earlier name but rather was renamed Communism Peak. Stalinabad, the capital of Tadzhik Republic, did regain its original Tadzhik name of Dushanbe, but here the change was back to the old name of a caravan stop and had nothing to do with tsarist Russia.

Going back to Sankt-Peterburg from Leningrad was reversion with a vengeance, literally. It has been said that some people born in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed with a Slavic calque in World War I) have lived out their lives in Leningrad and will die in Sankt-Peterburg. Sankt-Peterburg is awkward, is un-Slavic, un-Russian, grating. Peter’s city has hardly ever been called that in conversational Russian. Peterburg is the name in common use and is the title of Belyi’s novel about the city. An informal, slightly irreverent name, corresponding to such slangy American contractions as Chi, Philly, and Frisco, that spans the official mutations is Piter (pronounced roughly like English Peter).

In November, 1991, when I mentioned to a resident of Sankt-Peterburg my distaste for the restored official name, she shrugged and remarked, “Well, the thing was to get rid of the Lenin.” Nothing laid bare the latent loathing of Communism, even at its best, in Russia so strikingly as the change by referendum from Leningrad to Sankt-Peterburg. The change was made by popular demand despite the plea of older residents that it not be made till they, who had heroically withstood the German siege of Leningrad, were dead and gone. The renaming of both Leningrad and Stalingrad was historically and psychologically costly because nothing that has happened in either city amounts to nearly so much as their roles in World War II. One can hardly say, “The defeat of von Paulus’ army at Volgograd was the turning point of the war.” Conversely when cities like Kuibyshev and Sverdlovsk or institutions like the Kirov Theater or streets like Gorky Street regained their original names, it was rather as if they had got back on track, as if they had been on a siding since, say, the tsar and his family were murdered at Ekaterinburg.

Like the October Revolution, the so-called Second Russian Revolution has brought changes to the Russian language that in some cases have spilled over into English and other languages. Glasnost and perestroika are obvious examples of old Russian words that have acquired new, revolutionary significance and been borrowed with their new meanings. Examples of words drawn into the Russian vocabulary by recent revolutionary developments are: mafia, miting ‘mass meeting’ and its verb form mitingovat’, and biznes and biznesmen in a non-pejorative sense. There is also a tendency to resurrect words current in tsarist times and play around with them. For example, the Sunday supplement of Izvestia for November 11-17, 1991, has an article on divorce in Russia that is titled: “Your Ladyship, Dame Separation…”

During the period of destalinization Stalin Peak in the Pamirs, the highest point in the USSR, was renamed Communism Peak. One wonders whether the mountain has been re-renamed or soon will be. Capitalism Peak? Free Market Mountain? Well no, the peak’s next appellation will probably be a Tadzhik name since the mountain is in Tadzhikistan. Examples of this kind of national restoration of local names are the renaming of Stalinabad already mentioned and the renaming of the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Formerly renamed for the Soviet military hero Frunze, it is now again called Bishkek, which I take to be Kyrgyz for something.

What is to be the fate of the Russian language in the fragmented, formerly “brotherly” republics? I have noticed that on televised newscasts Lithuanians, Georgians, and Armenians almost always speak to reporters or their interpreters in fluent Russian. A Vienna-based cotton broker whom I met in Sankt-Peterburg in November, 1991, was negotiating with Uzbeks in Russian. At about the same time a young Uzbek on the train between Moscow and Petersburg seemed perfectly at home in Russian, I suspect more so than he would have been in Uzbek. On the other hand, a few years ago I met a Lithuanian film maker in Tashkent who spoke or would speak no Russian at all. Perhaps Russian in most of the former Soviet empire will be grudgingly retained as an economic and maybe even political lingua franca, somewhat like English in India. Conceivably, especially in the Baltic states, English could become the working language for trade and technology and even have a cultural impact like Demotic Greek in the Mediterranean basin in classic times. But one can hardly imagine that Sankt-Peterburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/ Sankt-Peterburg will ever be called Peterston.

OBITER DICTA: Meditation on media

J.A. Davidson, Victoria, British Columbia

Graham Green, in the second of his autobiographical books, Ways of Escape, told this about his friend, Evelyn Waugh: “Evelyn’s diaries have been joyfully exploited by the media, a word that has come to mean bad journalism.” Yes, of course. But I have noticed that is is principally the windier electronic journalists, and advertising and PR gentry, who like to use the word media (often pronounced [MEEja]), whereas those print journalists who have sensitivity in English usage rarely use it.

Webster’s New World Dictionary gives this as one of several definitions for medium: “a means of communication that reaches the general public and carries advertising.” Then it points out that “in this sense, a singular form media (plural medias) is now sometimes heard.” I was afraid that something like that would happen. Perhaps before long the fancier speakers and writers will begin to use mediae as the plural. (Actually, that is the accepted plural for the media that is the ‘middle coat of the wall of a blood or lymph vessel.')

Medium was used in England in the late 18th century with respect to newspapers, and media may have had some use in that sense during the 19th century. But the plural has come into full flower only during the middle years of this century. It was not given in the 1944 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary, but is in the two most recent editions.

Now we have an unseemly horde of derivatives. A few times I have been called a mediaperson because for many years I have done a little freelancing for newspapers and magazines. (I have also been called a POB ‘print-oriented bastard’ because I have only flimsy interest in radio and television, except as a consumer of some of what they have to offer.)

A word that could be useful if it were not so abominable is mediamorphosis which someone in academia coined to designate the distortion or transformation of facts in some of the media. Then there is the media event, an event staged deliberately and cunningly, even manipulatively, for extensive coverage by the media: it has also been called a pseudoevent.

A person who has qualities that make him attractive to the media, especially television, is now said to be mediagenic. I once met at a conference a man who gloried in the title media coordinator: I learned that his principle duties were taperecording and film-projecting. If you are media-shy you do not like being interviewed or reported on by mediapersons.

Media fragmentation is the marketing concept that there can be too many outlets for a successful sales campaign: customers are assailed by so many appeals for their business that the campaign backfires. This results when the experts have not accurately measured media weight, whatever that may be.

EPISTOLA {Emilio Bernal Lebrada}

But there is a word for it! As a professional translator who has devoted more than 40 years to the translation of English into Spanish, I beg to differ with John R. Cassidy in “There Just Isn’t a Word for It” [XVIII,2].

Schedule. In addition to horario, proyecto, and programa, mentioned by Mr. Cassidy (and the corresponding verbs, proyectar, programar), Spanish has the very useful one-word equivalents calendario, agenda, and diario (for ‘daily schedule,’ of course). And we should not forget the always handy plan and planear.

Argument. The Spanish dictionary reveals argumento and argumentación as perfectly good Spanish words with meanings equivalent to argument (in the sense of ‘reasoning,’ if not in that of ‘dispute’). The verb argumantar ‘to argue’ is in common use.

Esperar can mean ‘to wait’ or ‘to hope,’ but to clarify the latter meaning one can say abrigo la esperanza, literally, ‘I have the hope.’ As for the meaning ‘to expect,’ literate Spanish speakers know that—aside from using the noun expectativa—the precise meaning is conveyed by employing the reflexive no me esperaba, no se esperaba, etc. For example, ‘I was waiting for the bus and hoping it would come; but when it did, I no longer expected it’ would be rendered as Estaba esperando (or aguardando) el autobús con la esperanza de que llegara; pero cuando vino ya no me lo esperaba.

Drop. There is a very simple way to say ‘it dropped’ without using the self-accusatory ‘I dropped it’ lo dejé caer or the reflexive se me cayó: one can just say se cayó. Lo dejé caer does not necessarily imply ‘on purpose’; it can also mean ‘accidentally.’ And se me cayó cannot be rendered, even literally, as ‘it fell itself to me’: its meaning is something more akin to ‘it slipped away (or out of my hands) and fell.’ This type of construction is best handled be se me fue, which may be translated as ‘it got away from me.’

Chairman. There is another word besides presidente: it is director. Or one can use jefe or regente.

Ganar. In addition to ganar, ‘to earn’ can be rendered as cobrar, lucrar, or percibir.

“Kill the Christian Democrats” ‘Kill’ is not an appropriate equivalent of mueran, which is better translated as ‘death to’: it is not an exhortation ‘to wipe out,’ merely an expectation or hope that the object of execration go to an early grave.

[Emilio Bernal Lebrada, Falls Church, Virginia]

EPISTOLA {Janine Bechu}

Your correspondent, Raymond Harris [XIX, 1], is quite wrong in thinking that Chevalier N. Kenne Grant was using a bogus word.

The expression Beau-Tick (beautiful mark) is commonly used in Bordeaux with its many associations with Anglo-French Negociants.

[Janine Bechu, London]

EPISTOLA {Campbell James}

Clearly, David Galef’s classics course was done in translation, for had he read in Greek, he would never have written “Pandora’s Box” but “Pandora’s Wine Jar” [“The Niceness Principle,” XVII, 2]. The Greek word was (and is) πíθoς (pithos) a ‘six-footish wine jar.’ This error is a perpetuation of Erasmus, who published his Adagia (1500) in which, inter alia, appears the Pandora story in which he mistakes πυξις (pyxis) a ‘smallish boxwood box’ for πιθος, the largest wine storage container.

[Campbell James, Newport, Rhode Island]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: English Adverbial Collocations

Christian Douglas Kozlowska, (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa, 1991), 163pp.

Most of those who learned English as a native language have not even the slightest idea of the problems facing people who learn it as a foreign language. Those who do not have to give a second thought to the idiomaticity of English word order can count themselves doubly blessed: the system does not yield readily to rules, as native speakers know from listening to the speech of foreigners who have not quite mastered it, regardless of how long they have been using the language. Thus, it is with the greatest tolerance and sympathy that one approaches the review of a book that, in its first fifty pages, attempts to provide users with some inkling as to what is going on in English word order, whether the book was written by a native speaker or a foreigner.

From a hint given on page 51, one gathers that Kozlowska studied at Edinburgh University; from her facility with the English used in her discussion of collocations, one gains the impression that she has excellent control of the language. But difficulties begin to become apparent when one investigates her analysis of English collocations.

(For those unfamiliar with the term collocation, a quotation from the opening words of the book is useful:

What is a collocation? It can be said to be a set of two or more words that frequently occur in juxtaposition and that seem to ‘fit together.’ We say: ‘a pretty girl,’ and ‘a beautiful woman,’ but a ‘handsome man.’ We say ‘drive fast’ and ‘expand rapidly,’ but ‘get tired quickly.’ It will be noticed that in each of these examples the meaning of the various modifiers is basically the same, but different words are used to express it, depending on the word that is modified. [p. 9]

If we call the way the speakers of a given language puts its words together idiom, then the process of separating out the resulting phrases produces collocations. An idiom, a combination of two or more words the meaning of which is different from the literal meaning of the sum of its components (like kick the bucket, red herring), is distinguished from the concept of idiom, which refers to the natural order and combination of words by a native speaker. Unfortunately, we do not have separate words for the two in English; in French, the red herring type is conveniently called idiotisme and the conceptual one is called idiome. So far, English speakers have shunned calling anything they say an “idiotism,” so the ambiguity remains.)

It scarcely needs me to point out that English word order is indescribably complex, so it is no small wonder that in a brief work like this, while the author has labored mightily (and successfully) to identify many of its features, she has inevitably failed to cover all contingencies.

The first disagreement I have with her is in her use of the term homonym, which she defines as “[a word] looking the same, but differing in meaning [from another word]” [p. 11]. She then proceeds to call see ‘physically’ and see ‘comprehend’ homonyms, as well as provoke ‘anger’ and provoke ‘cause,’ run ‘physical sense’ and run ‘work, function,’ and attack ‘physically’ and attack ‘verbally.’ I eschew the term homonym because it suffers from an inherent ambiguity: a homograph is, to lexicographers, at least, a word that is spelled the same as another but has a different etymology (bear 1‘animal’/ bear 2 ‘carry’; bore 1‘carried’/ bore 2 ‘drill’/bore 3 ‘tire’/ bore 4 ‘tide wave’); a homophone is a word that sounds exactly like another but is spelled differently (bear/bare; bier/beer; bore/boar). In this context, homonym, which is usually defined as a ‘word that is pronounced or spelled like another but having a different meaning,’ is ambiguous, if not inaccurate, for the implication is that homonyms are different words.

In her care to be precise, the author errs by writing, “The language is British. No U.S. expressions are given.” As it happens, of course, most of what is described is American English as well, so the second part of the statement is incorrect.

As Koslowska correctly points out, the choice of adverb or adjective depends largely on the verb, adverb, or substantive being modified. The problem arises with the enormous flexibility of metaphor accorded by language: we can use provocative of words, situations, and even low-cut dresses, depending on the focus of emphasis of what is being provoked. I should not like to have to face the task of listing all the adverbs that might be used with the verb run, even if it is restricted to cars: smoothly, quietly, silently, uninterruptedly, fitfully, intermittently, efficiently, well, faultlessly, beautifully, perfectly, poorly, badly, sluggishly, economically, swiftly, rapidly, quickly—and then one must be prepared to add the multi-word phrasal modifiers, like without a hitch, as if it would never stop, like a clock, like clockwork, etc. There is not a finite number, I am sure, but it must be a large number. The author is spared an exhaustive listing by the constraints of her corpus (British newspapers), which provides a representative listing but barely scratches the surface of the language.

I would take issue with the analysis of [ACTIVE ONLY, ACTIVE/PASSIVE,] and [PASSIVE ONLY] constructions, if only because one of the nastiest areas of grammatical analysis of English lies in distinguishing between passives—that is, past participles—and adjectives. We would say, for example, that gone in He has gone is a past participle but an adjective in He is gone (if only because English does not use the verb to be as an auxiliary, the way French does); alleged in it was alleged is clearly a past participle, but in the alleged culprit it is an adjective. It is set forth [p.21] that contrive something can be modified by brilliantly, neatly, or skilfully only in the [PASSIVE], with cleverly, ingeniously restricted to its [ACTIVE/PASSIVE] reflexes; but that is not so, for we can say, They brilliantly/neatly/skilfully/treacherously/nefariously… contrived to make the blame fall on the chairman. The sentence Napoleon badly/ignominiously defeated the Austrians and Russians is called “wrong” on the grounds that badly and ignominiously (like heavily, thoroughly, utterly) can be used only with a passive verb; but we can say Napoleon defeated the Austrians and Russians badly or ignominiously at Austerlitz without violating natural English idiom.

In a short section in which “Postmodifying adverbs with adjectives” are discussed, confusion is confounded by juxtaposing stiff neck with We were worried stiff. The latter is not readily analyzable by normal parsing, for if we are drawn to retain the adjectival nature of stiff (instead of conceding that it might be used as an adverb), we are obliged to characterize worried as having taken on the guise of a copula.

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Volunteer Tudors Needed.” [From an >ad in the Sentinel-Standard (Ionia, Michigan), 19 January 1988. Submitted by Lloyd Walker, Greenville.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“WARNER’S BUY 6, GET 2!” [From a Macy’s advertisement, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 29 November 1990. Submitted by Irene H. Cotton, Philadelphia.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play

Delia Chiaro, (Routledge, 1992), x + 129pp.

That humor is a very serious business is certainly borne out by the po-faced treatment the subject receives in this analysis, though the fault cannot be said to lie with the author. The subject, alas, calls for jokes to be explained, surely the most painful experience that could be dreamt up by the mind of woman (just to give them equal time): Torquemada do your worst! It is hard to believe that anyone could survive the mental thumbscrew that explaining jokes inflicts: even if one has not got a joke and its explanation is, in a sense, welcome—after all, no one likes to feel left out—what humor it might once have possessed is crushed out of it. I have tried to write about humor and have found it such a humorless chore that I have given up, usually after one paragraph. There is a great deal to be said about jokes and humor in general, and it is hard to understand why the subject is so exasperatingly boring. Perhaps it is because there is a huge difference between something’s being funny and the explanation of why it is funny, often given to someone who does not think it is.

Those jokes in one’s native language that need explanation are usually those that have references outside the ken of the listener. Ms. Chiaro treats not only these but, when she hits full stride, the difficulties in translating jokes between languages, where even the explanations are often hard to get across, because of either sociocultural differences, linguistic differences, or both. Puns are a common source of jokes, especially those that have come to be called “one-liners.” In a recent letter in Sunday Times Books [18 October 1992], a West Sussex headmaster wrote as follows:

For years it has been sub-editing practice to headline pieces in a punning manner: in the Books section of October 11, for example, we have, “The art of friction,” “Tartar source,” “Reef encounters,” “Class menagerie.”

My mild amusement at this is, after a couple of decades, turning to mild irritation: any chance of a change?

Jokes involve the use of language most of the time, though the author acknowledges the existence of visual jokes, too. One of the shortcomings of the book is the failure to cover, even minimally, the major types of jokes. For example, the current trend among stand-up comedians—particularly as reflected in the persistent American television broadcasts from various “improvs”—is simply to retail common, ordinary, everday events and rely on the audience to laugh appreciatively at the perception of the “comedian” to point out our foibles. I suppose that can be classified as a reaction of mild amusement at the cleverness displayed, but it, too, soon cloys.

The author does not appear to have reached serious conclusions: at the end of the book, in a short section titled Conclusion, she offers some useful observations about “expressions of humor” and about the difficulties encountered by a teacher of English as a foreign language in trying to impart to students the linguistic skills required to understand English literature; but these observations can scarcely be termed “conclusions,” for no coherent theory has actually been set forth in the book.

Chiaro, always more that than oscuro in her presentation, is not only not to be blamed for the lack of theory but merits praise for having tackled a subject that most of us dread and that has not been treated satisfactorily by any of its commentators, from Plato to Freud to Hockett, et al. In such a brief treatment, it is not possible to cover every aspect of a complex, multifaceted, albeit deadly subject.

I found only two small errors, both on page 94: “homphone,” and the transcription \?\/tInguetI/ should be \?\/tInguttI/(for Italian cinguetti).

Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Oxford Companion to the English Language

Tom McArthur, ed., (Oxford University Press, 1992), xxvii (xxix) + 1184pp.

Readers of VERBATIM and all who share their interests in language should own a copy of this outstanding work. Although it is not exhaustive in its coverage, the OCEL offers by far the most comprehensive picture available of the English language as the 20th century draws to a close. Still, for historical reasons one should have liked to see entries for Ido, Interlingua, and Volapük, which do not merit even mention under ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE; Syntactic Structures, listed under CHOMSKY, ought to have its own entry, if only for the cross reference (though TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR is in); scores of individuals, from contemporaries like Yorick Wilks to important historical commentators like Alford, Pegge, and Tooke, would have provided informative, useful entries. (It hardly behooves me to complain, as there is an entry not only for VERBATIM but for URDANG, Laurence; besides, I must accept responsibility as contributor of a number of the entries, though, of course, I did not see the complete work till it was published.)

I see from the foregoing that I have, inevitably, slipped into the reviewer’s trap, so neatly laid by generations before me, of commenting on what is not in the book under discussion rather than what is. If I have not impaled myself on the upthrusting points of editors’ razor-sharp styli, I shall try to recover. Some of the more interesting kinds of entries deal with writers. As the OCEL is concerned with language, per se, one would expect such entries to treat the writer’s style, and, indeed, the entry on MELVILLE does so; but the treatment is uneven: that for CONRAD, aside from quoting a passage from Heart of Darkness, is barren of comment on language, and that for BURGESS focuses on a quotation of nadtsat’ from A Clockwork Orange, with no mention of the author’s position (at least in the UK) as a language guru. Admittedly, such entries are extremely difficult to compose, but a proper treatment has certainly been successfully attempted in the entries for SHAKESPEARE and for ORWELL.

The occasional historical comment involving history recent enough for me to have been a part of it is not always exactly right. For example, under RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY is given the information, “Recognizing an opportunity in the national outcry against Webster’s New International Dictionary (Merriam, 1961), Random House commissioned an expansion of its American College Dictionary (1947) ….” As it happened, the first plans for the expansion of the ACD were discussed in 1958, when the people at Random House had no inkling of a forthcoming new edition from Merriam; as I have described elsewhere, from its conception, the plans for the RHD were entirely market-driven. In the entry for COMPUTER TYPESETTING, the information is given, “Starting in the 1970s, devices with film strips or film wheels, containing images of characters, were widely used to produce master copies on photographic film. More recently, the use of pre-made film images has given way to cathode-ray tubes which generate characters as requested.” The Photon machine was in use during the 1950s: I was used for the composition of the Funk Wagnalls Dictionary—International Edition in 1956; I was present at a demonstration of the (Mergenthaler) Linofilm in the early 1960s; and Dr. Hell’s Digisetter, which generated “characters as requested” from what we might today call image bytes (to distinguish them from pixels) was in use in the latter part of the 1960s: one was certainly in operation in 1969 at the McCall Corporation’s composition plant in Princeton, New Jersey, driven by an RCA Spectrum computer. One hopes that such factual slips can be cleared up in the next edition (or printing).

It would have been useful had the entry FOLK ETYMOLOGY included a reference to Folk Etymology, A Dictionary of Verbal Corruption or Words Perverted in Form and Meaning by False Derivations or Mistaken Analogy, Rev. A. Palmer Smyth, George Bell & Sons [London], 1882. On the other hand, now that I have provided the reference, I suppose that there is no need to add it to the OCEL.

Turning to subjects about which I know little, I was delighted by the full and informative article, INDIAN ENGLISH 1, but even that provokes a criticism (probably felt by the Editor even more strongly than by me), namely, where is the Index? There is such a wealth of material buried in its thousands of articles that remains inaccessible for lack of an Index that one despairs of the judgment of the publishers. I know, I know: there is a thematic guide in the forematter and the two types of cross references at the ends of the entries are extremely helpful; also, to have added an Index would have run up the price of the book by another 25 per cent (or whatever). But so what? What boots it to have paid 20 per cent less (I shall leave it to you to do the arithmetic) for a book the depths and wisdom of which it is difficult to plumb without an Index. In the entry PHILOLOGY, for instance, appears a reference to ‘dead’ language, but there is no mention of that entry at DEAD LANGUAGE (which, in any event, has only cross references, quite appropriate in view of the fact that the subject of the book is English). Still, members of The Society of Indexers will spin in their groove— and with justification!

The OCEL is, surely, a prodigious undertaking and Tom McArthur, aided by his wife Feri, deserves enormous credit for having produced a well-balanced work. Inevitably, one encounters articles on relatively abstruse subjects that, owing to concision, are not easily understood, chiefly because they assume a level of sophistication not necessarily possessed by the user. The lengthy article on LITERARY CRITICISM, though conveniently broken down into fifteen sections, proved difficult reading for me. In a review of OCEL in the Times Literary Supplement [11 December 1992] it was suggested that inserting asterisks alongside the terms that were treated in their own entries would have helped; that is certainly an accepted and often helpful practice in longer encyclopedic texts, but it tends to interrupt reading and clutters up shorter entries of the kind encountered in the OCEL. It was further suggested that language is not best served by alphabetic organization, but that is merely a plea for much longer, more comprehensive articles, which lie outside the scope of a Companion. Given the restrictions on space, the editors have done an admirable job.

One must bear in mind, too, that one of the most difficult of an editor’s responsibilities in such a work is to rewrite articles submitted by contributors, with widely disparate writing styles, in order to make them, if not uniform, at least compatible. In fine, while there is no doubt that the Companion will—and should—become a standard work on the language, one must not impute to its function anything more than its service as a guide: the English language is unimaginably vast, in its origins and history, in its literary, philosophical, psychological, social, and specialized applications, and in the descriptions of its grammar, usage, dialects, and lexicon, both historical and contemporary. Consider that the OED, which makes no pretensions at being exhaustive or complete, occupies some twenty quarto volumes in its description of the lexicon alone; consider that a descriptive bibliography of the huge number of lexicographical works on the myriad aspects of English alone would occupy several similar volumes; consider the multivolume works on English grammar—by Curme, Poutsma, Jespersen, et al.; consider the immense corpus of English literature and of the writings about it; and then consider all the material ancillary to the foregoing: the teaching of English not only to foreign learners but to native speakers as well, the conventions of writing, punctuation, usage, and pronunciation, the multifarious influences of English and on English around the world, the study of style and of literary devices, etymology, etc. It is difficult enough to assimilate all the categories associated with language without trying to cope with their organization and treatment. In such an attempt, there are bound to be points of disagreement, arguments that “important” subjects have been accorded short shrift, minor inaccuracies that will submit to later refinement.

It is neither a matter of “Don’t shoot the piano-player, he’s doing the best he can,” nor of “If y' know a better ‘ole, go to it”: the OCEL stands as a mighty effort and, in my over-all estimation, a hugely successful one at bringing together into a coherent, cohesive work what is—at least—a superb introduction to what must be acknowledged to be a subject that is at once the most complex, changeable, elusive, technical, emotional, political, controversial subject of all time.

Laurence Urdang

OBITER DICTA: Notes and Queries, 9th S. VI. Aug. 25, 1900.

Alex Leeper, Trinity College, University of Melbourne

Those who have met with extracts from Notes and Queries in earlier issues of VERBATIM have pressed to see more. As each year of N & Q is contained in two large octavo volumes of some 500 pages (excluding the Index) set in eight-point type (with reviews of books and periodicals in six-point), readers will appreciate that it takes a while to read through several years’ worth of material and will be patient as the volumes are mined for their gems of informative, occasionally entertaining matter. On the grounds that much of what we have to say today has been said (or written)—often better—before, it is hoped that the following will prove interesting and useful to those who do not have ready access to those early volumes (or the time to read them). If the punctuation seems a little odd, it is because it has not been changed from the original to conform to the modern practice.

As will be seen, not every one of the following extracts is from N & Q occasionally, another, relatively rare source (though fortunately accessible in the VERBATIM library) has yielded an item of interest.

Where Are They Now?

Pray, what did T. Buchanan Read?

And what did E.A. Poe?

What volumes did Elizur Wright?

And where did E.A. Roe?

Is Thomas Hardy nowadays?

Is Rider Haggard pale?

Is Minot Savage? Oscar Wilde?

And Edward Everett Hale?

Was Laurence Sterne? was Hermann Grimm?

Was Edward Young? John Gay?

Jonathan Swift? and old John Bright?

And why was Thomas Gray?

Was John Brown? and is J.R. Green?

Chief Justice Taney quite?

Is William Black? R.D. Blackmore?

Mark Lemon? H.K. White?

Was Francis Bacon lean in streaks?

John Suckly vealy? Pray,

Was Hogg much given to the pen?

Are Lamb’s Tales sold today?

Did Mary Mapes Dodge just in time?

Did C.D. Warner? How?

At what did Andrew Marvell so?

Does Edward Whymper now?

What goodies did Rose Terry Cooke?

Or Richard Boyle beside?

What gave the wicked Thomas Paine?

And made Mark Akenside?

Was Thomas Tickell-ish at all?

Did Richard Steele, I ask?

Tell me, has George A. Sala suit?

Did William Ware a mask?

Does Henry Cabot Lodge at home?

John Horne Tooke what and when?

Is Gordon Cumming? Has G. Lo.

Cabled his friends again?

OBITER DICTA: antidisestablishmentarians

Everard Home Coleman.

“Dr. Murray points out in his notes to In-Infer that those who are interested in the length of words will observe that incircumscriptibleness has as many letters as honorificabilitudinity, viz., 22. The authority quoted for the former is one Byfield, a divine, who in a treatise on Collossians, published in 1615, wrote: ‘The immensity of Christ’s divine nature hath …incircumscriptibleness in respect of place.’ In the recent biography of Dr. Benson is an entry from the Archbishop’s diary to the effect that ‘the Free Kirk of the North of Scotland are strong antidisestablishmentarians, 26 letters.”

Ibid.

9th S. VI. Aug. 25, 1900.

disintellectualization

from Jeremy Bentham’s Abridged Petition for Justice, 1829, p.18.

Ibid.

9th S. VI. Sept. 15, 1900, p. 207.

Mispronounced words: schism (as [skizm] rather than [sizm]).

data

…as a singular noun noted in London Stock Market Report, 11 August 1900, is, according to N & Q editor, “probably due to ignorance.”

Old England

First used in 1641, 21 years after the American colony of New Virginia received the name of New England:

“Oh, the roast beef of England, And old England’s roast beef!”

Grub Street Opera, III, ii, Henry Fielding.

OBITER DICTA

Laurence Urdang

It is well known that the origins of many words still elude the most determined researchers in etymology, but, taken as a whole, I should imagine that the proportion of idiomatic expressions without confirmed etymologies may be higher than that of words whose provenance has not been established. That is not for the want of speculative comment by those who offered largely folk etymologies, which readers of VERBATIM will recall so sorely vexed Walter W. Skeat. The expression take down a peg is purported to have originated in a time when peg tankards were in popular use. The following extract is of interest:

Peg-Tankards, of which I have seen a few still remaining in Derbyshire, have in the inside a row of eight pins one above another, from top to bottom; the tankards hold two quarts, so that there is a gill of ale, i.e., half a pint Winchester measure, between each pin. The first person that drank was to empty the tankard to the first peg or pin; the second was to empty to the next pin, &c.; by which means the pins were so many measures to the compotators, making them all drink alike, or the same quantity; and as the distance of the pins was such as to contain a large draught of liquor, the company would be very liable by this method to get drunk, especially when, if they drank short of the pin, or beyond it, they were obliged to drink again. For this reason, in Archbishop Anselm’s Canons, made in the Council at London in 1102, Priests are enjoined not to go to drinking-bouts, nor to drink to Pegs. The words are: “Ut presbyteri non eant ad potationes, nec ad pinnas bibant” (Wilkins, Vol. I, p. 382). This shews the antiquity of this invention, which is at least as old as the Conquest.

Anonymiana; or Ten Centuries of Observations on Various Authors and Subjects, [Samuel Pegge], London, 1809, p. 183. [Published posthumously; written ca 1766.]

Perhaps I am missing something, but, in the event, it is difficult to understand how the expression take (someone) down a peg, which means ‘demean (someone); reduce (someone) in estimation, esp. his own; puncture the self-confidence or arrogance of (someone),’ unless it has changed somewhat over the years, could be connected with peg tankards. It seems unlikely to me that ‘being more precise than (someone) in a drinking competition’ could easily translate into the modern sense of the idiom. What has happened, evidently, is that peg acquired the sense of ‘step, measure, degree’ hence take (someone) down a peg meant ‘reduce (someone) by a measurable amount,’ and this is borne out by the OED at peg, sb. 1 3, (with variants) which has citations going back to 1589. (As the quotation above indicates, the 1102 Canons were in Latin, thus not valid citation fodder for the OED.) Those who would derive the expression directly from the peg tankard sense are thus not correct, for, while that attribution might have been the original source, the expression itself is traceable only to a metaphor once removed from the tankard.

EX CATHEDRA: The Diamond Jubilee Issue

As it is unlikely that I shall be around to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee Year of VERBATIM, it seemed reasonable to celebrate while I can and to reminisce, briefly. As we all know, one characteristic of time is that it stretches out before us in an apparently interminable manner; yet, when one looks back, it seems to have fled, disappeared, evaporated—heaven knows where. When VERBATIM was first published, though, I cannot recall having looked forward much beyond the first issue; now, thinking back, I find it astonishing that seventy-four numbers have preceded this one. The life of a periodical is quite unpredictable; periodicals change or remain the same, but people are more likely to change than remain the same, with the consequent disappearance of venerable publications like Punch, for example. I do not have figures for the number of periodicals that have met their end during the past two decades, but I understand that there have been many.

VERBATIM, too, has had its ups and downs. The first issue was mailed to 96 paid subscribers; this issue will go to more than 7000, including many outside the United States that are not numbered among those listed in the audited annual circulation report required by the Postal Service to maintain a Second Class mailing privilege. According to a survey we conducted some years ago, each issue of VERBATIM is read, on average, by about three people (excluding those that go to libraries). Thus, The Language Quarterly has more than 20,000 readers in some 60-odd countries. Perhaps the most gratifying thing about publishing it is that an average of more than 75 per cent of subscribers renew; in recent years, the response has been 100 per cent to the renewal notices attached to certain issues. I am given to understand that, aside from journals associated with membership in some organization, anything beyond 50 per cent is considered phenomenal. Yet, we have never sent subscribers more than one renewal notice followed up by a reminder a few weeks later.

On the first page of Volume I, Number 1, I promised readers (among other things) that their names and addresses would never be sold to anyone, on the grounds that everyone receives enough junk mail as it is. That promise has been kept: companies seeking our mailing list are told that the only way to reach our readers is through advertising in the pages of VERBATIM.

Looking at the price of VERBATIM, it might be worthwhile noting that the first issue consisted of six pages; the first volume contained 28 pages (issues alternating six and eight pages) and a subscription cost $2.50 (about £1.75 in 1974). The price was increased to $4.00 (£2.75) a couple of years later. Today, VERBATIM publishes 104 pages a year for $16.50 (£11.50)—not including this double issue. For those who do not object to (very) rough statistics, that averages out to an increase of from 8.9¢ (6.25p) per page to 15.9¢ (11.5p) per page. That might seem like an unconscionable increase, allowing for normal inflation, but the costs of paper and postage (especially) have been driven up out of proportion.

The greatest cost we encounter is that of advertising, which is not only expensive but yields meagre results in comparison to the money spent. It is impossible to find another publication in which to advertise that is quite like VERBATIM—that is, one that reaches people who are interested in language—so we advertise in media whose readers are likely prospects and hope for the best. Our current (September 1992 to February 1993) campaign has cost more than $30,000 (£20,000), yielding, so far, fewer than 1000 subscribers. It is not difficult to calculate that readers so expensively acquired are not profitable till they have renewed for the third year. Factor in the 75 per cent renewal rate, and it can be seen that one must wait till the fourth year’s renewal; although revenues from advertising and book sales improve that slightly, they are offset by the fact that we have recently begun paying all contributors

The foregoing are facts, not a plea of any kind for anything except to urge those who enjoy VERBATIM, who have made it the highest-circulation popular language journal in the (English-speaking) world, to encourage others who share their interest to subscribe and to send in their renewals quickly. VERBATIM makes an inexpensive gift for any occasion and is especially enjoyed by teachers (who plunder it for ideas) and students.

Readers of long standing are aware that a few years ago we discontinued both The VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue (because filling orders became enormously complicated) and, after five years, The VERBATIM Annual Essay Competition (because the number of high-quality submissions was diminishing). Beginning when the Competition was terminated, we established the VERBATIM Award, “for the Pursuit of Scholarship in Lexicography.” Each January, a Committee consisting of the three past-presidents of EURALEX (the European Association for Lexicography) select one or more successful applicants from among EURALEX members to receive the award of £1500 (between $2500 and $3000). Since it was set up, the entire award, at the discretion of the Committee, has been made to one person each year. It may not be much, but, like VERBATIM, it is, as they say, the only game in town.

Finally, it might interest readers to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, now available on CD-ROM, lists 121 citations from VERBATIM (through Spring 1985 only).

*Laurence Urdang *

Tomorrow’s Business Buzzwords

Michael Johnson, London

Change is in the air, and change brings innovation in language. New terms spring up to reflect new ideas. I am betting that new business jargon will flourish in three major categories in the 1990s: human resources, internationalization, and high technology. The trends are becoming worldwide among English speakers as free trade and the lowering of economic borders serve as a catalyst for all three.

The function of business jargon is threefold: it describes new phenomena (PCN, Knowbot); it can camouflage unpleasantness (Decruitment, RIF); or it can simply amuse (Globasm, Glocal). Some of the other forces that prompt new words in the English language include the arrival of the Japanese on the world business scene and the penetration of computers into our daily life. Admittedly, some people use buzzwords as a weapon in the corporate jungle. They pepper their speech with more and more of these strange terms and words until their rivals and colleagues find them difficult to understand. When an adversary has to ask for clarification, the jargon-wielder has won a point.

Here is a selection from the future, organized in the three most fertile categories.

1. OPTIMIZING HUMAN RESOURCES

RIF ‘Reduction in force.’ This is a euphemism for ‘sackings or firings.’ It also works as a verb, when the chief hatchetman reports, after a busy day: “Great news, boss. We riffed another thousand today.”

decruitment Human resources jargon for ‘eliminating staff’; the opposite of recruitment. If you are decruited, you are out of a job, but your superiors feel better about not having “fired” you. In fact, rule No. 1 for the surviving managers is never to utter the F-word.

right-sizing ‘Reduction of payroll to conform to the staffing needs of the moment.’ This term is loaded with sanctimony. In effect, it says to the victim: “Don’t argue with us; just go away. We know what size workforce is right.”

skill-mix adjustment ‘Reducing the company’s strengths while also trimming away part of the workforce.’ This term can dress up even the most ruthless staff-cutting program. Smart packaging is half the battle.

2. GOING INTERNATIONAL

globasm ‘Compulsive international expansion to achieve instant gratification.’ Companies that seek recognition as world-class players sometimes move hastily into international acquisitions and alliances. The heavy costs to the balance sheet and the problems of culture clash can lead to a feeling of depression and disappointment after the initial euphoria.

PCN ‘Parent-company national: an executive of the same culture as the headquarters flag.’ As managers begin to cross borders to work for companies outside their native country, they bump into a barrier they probably never imagined—the wall of parent-company nationals that stands between them and advancement. The PCNs have a strong career advantage: they went to the same schools, they use the same references, they have the same mother tongue. In France, for example, you must know your Victor Hugo, your Napoleonic victories, and your future conditional. Tricky territory for the ambitious foreigner.

dochukaku The Japanese term for ‘adapting corporate ways to local conditions.’ Originally, this word was an agricultural term for adapting seed and fertilizer to local soil conditions.

transnational company ‘A firm that merges with a foreign partner.’

multidomestic ‘An international company that allows its foreign subsidiaries autonomy and local identity.’ Different from multinational, in which the emphasis is on worldwide homogeneity.

cross-border alliance ‘Links with companies beyond your home borders.’ A strong trend in the early phases of Europe’s burgeoning Single Market. The cross-border alliance in technology, marketing, manufacturing, even exchange of equity, is a good way to test a partner before going for an outright takeover.

glocal ‘The fine balance between an international company’s global imperatives and local requirements.’ Done well, it ensures the best of both worlds. Probable a buzzword with a good future.

3. HIGH TECHNOLOGY

face time ‘Personal, face-to-face meetings with human beings.’ The opposite of communication by electronic mail, voicemail, or straight telephone talk. A true computer nerd might say: “I talked with him for six months on Compuserve, then we finally got some good face time at Comdex in Vegas.”

knowbot ‘A smart software package that acts like a robot.’ Typically, a data-base searcher that selects information according to personal interests, which the computer deduces from every previous search conducted by the operator. Very Orwellian.

zaitech ‘Financial engineering in Japanese technology companies applied as a way of bolstering profits.’ Zai ‘finance’ + tech ‘technology.’

Big Iron Tough talk among computer salesmen to designate ‘large computer systems that cost millions of dollars.’ Such machines are not exactly a disappearing breed, but they are increasingly replaced by workstations that are growing steadily in power and speed.

Bird Talk

David Rickerby, Brighton, Sussex

When one enters prison for the first time, many new things must be learned—and learned fast. Such things as where to go, what to and what not to do, how to behave with one’s fellow inmates, and how to communicate with them. Primarily created as a self-defence measure against eavesdroppers, prison slang in its own evocative way describes common and not so common experiences, emotions, and professions. Inmates are not refused, they are knockbacked; they are not told to leave but to Do one. If one hears of someone having Gone into one, he has not entered anything other than a state of extreme annoyance. Also, we do not ignore somebody; we blank him. It is far better to act in a trustworthy manner, thus one will be considered sound.

Whilst many of these terms may have entered the common vernacular, that is not the case with the majority. For, not only are convicts or screws ‘prison officers’ the only people to use them, they are likely to be the only people to know them.

Each crime has its own particular name, so the inmate in for screwing ‘burglary’ and the one in for hoisting ‘shoplifting,’ can be distinguished from the blagger ‘robber.’ Prison has a fairly fluid social structure, depending on the crimes committed, for how long and how much was earned. One thing is certain though: however much thieves—kiters ‘bad check passers,’ petermen ‘safecrackers,’ and ringers ‘car thieves who disguise and resell them’—as well as those already mentioned jockey for position, all despise the nonce ‘sex offender.’

As well as the nonce, the grass ‘informer’ is also in danger, such danger being especially acute if the offender is dragged into a pad (a.k.a. peter ‘cell’) out of sight and hearing of the kangas (short for kangaroo, rhyming slang for screw). Such inmates may have to be put on 43s (Rule 43 covers those inmates who are dangerous or in danger). Though the prison generally decides who is placed on 43s, an inmate may place himself on 43s, a process referred to as Going on the numbers. These inmates will be sent down the block ‘segregation unit’ and may even be ghosted ‘moved at short notice to another jail’ (a.k.a. shanghaied).

An inmate awaiting trial and thus on remand, will be in browns ‘wearing brown denims,’ while the convicted inmate will be in blues ‘wearing blue denims.’ Regardless of the color of his clothes, an e-man ‘one regarded as a potential or actual escaper’ will be in pathches ‘wearing clothes to which bright yellow patches have been sewn.’ Like the e-man someone who is on cat A ‘in maximum security’ will find life very restrictive, with all his movements being recorded in a little book. A Cat A man is thus also referred to as being on the book.

The jail one is sent to is of a specific type. One starts off at a local ‘the jail in one’s town or region.’ To prevent moral corruption, adults and Y.P.s ‘young prisoners: those under 21’ are placed in different parts of the jail. After sentencing, a Y.P. will go to a Y.O.I. ‘Young Offenders Institute,’ whilst his adult counterpart may go to a Dispersal, where longtermers are assessed before being sent to other jails. If given a relatively light sentence, one could be sent to an Open ‘minimum security jail.’

The boredom of jail is alleviated if one puts some puff (a.k.a. weed a.k.a. draw) ‘marijuana’ in with some burn (a.k.a. snout) ‘tobacco’ to make a joint ‘marijuana cigarette,’ which, when washed down with some hooch ‘illegally brewed alcohol’ can make the time pass a little quicker. If such activities come on Top ‘are discovered’ or one is caught bang to right ‘in possession or vicinity,’ the perpetrator is placed on Report (a.k.a. nicked) ‘charged with a breach of prison rules’ and put on adjudication ‘sent before the prison governor for punishment.’

After coming in, getting out is the major priority. One counts the days to one’s P.E.D. ‘Parole Earliest Date’: jam roll ‘parole’ is available after a third of a sentence has been served. Those serving long sentences for serious crimes will be more likely to get out on their E.D.R. ‘Earliest Date of Release,’ which is their sentence less a third taken off for good behavior. If one misbehaves, he will not be released till his L.D.R. ‘Latest Date of Release,’ which is the original sentence with no time off.

Visits, which are obtained by sending a V.O. ‘Visiting Order,’ are one of the few things to look forward to. One must be careful though, for if one is caught necking ‘swallowing drugs’ or passing out a stiff ‘a letter which has not passed through the hands of the prison censor,’ future visits may be closed in which ‘a screen is put between the prisoner and his visitor.

These words may be of only academic interest and of no practical use till one gets some bird (short for birdlime, rhyming slang for time), in which case an interpreter will be unnecessary.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Unsecured creditors get the shaft in mining bankruptcy.” [From The Silverton Standard and the Miner, 19 June 1986. Submitted by Fred W. Doolittle, Jr. Naples, Florida.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Tonight’s program focuses on stress, exercise, nutrition and sex with Celtic Scott Wedman, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Dick Cavett.” [Submitted by Richard Lederer, Concord, New Hampshire.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Gook: Derisive slang for Koreans; a corruption of the Korean han’guk saram, which means ‘Korean.’ [From U.S. News & World Report, 25 June 1990:36. Submitted by Charles Mendoza, North Miami.]

Why All Living Things Have Latin Names

Douglas S. Dodge, Guilford, Connecticut

One of the most beautiful names in the animal kingdom is the binomial for the evening grosbeak, the bird that was thought to sing only when night draws nigh. Hesperiphona vespertina might even be called a double binomial, because it says it twice—western sound (song)/at eventide. The binomial not only gives information, it also dispels confusion. The evening Igrosbeak is also called the western evening grosbeak, and the American hawfinch. When it appears in England (and it has been seen in Norway) the French get to call it the gros-bec errant, but the name known throughout the world remains Hesperiphona vespertina.

The other day a young lady brought me a dead moth. I reached back to my childhood, and remembered. “It’s a hawkmoth.” But she had already named it. She called it an “army moth,” because it had camouflage-like gray and green markings. “What other kinds of moths are there?” I went home to find the moth book my father and I had used. Cynthia’s specimen was the big poplar sphinx moth. Hawkmoths are also called sphinx moths. But big poplar sphinx does not say the same thing to everybody. There are one thousand different hawkmoths and sphinx moths in the world, and there are over a hundred thousand moths in other families of moths, and among them there are many dozens of “poplar” moths, big and little.

The confusion can be avoided by using the moth’s Latin name which was established two hundred years ago by a natural scientist named Carolus Linnaeus, and by the two-name namers who followed after him. Binomial nomenclature uses “a generic and a specific term, used to designate species.” Only the binomial, Pachysphinx modesta, pins down what Cynthia found. Its first, generic (general) name is a bonus—giving extra information—because it incorporates meanings for two of the stages of this animal—pachy- ‘thick’ (it is wide-bodied) for the adult insect, and the typical ‘sphinxlike’ raised head for the caterpillar stage. The second name, the (special) name, modesta, means ‘modest’ in the sense of ‘free from ostentation’ (Cynthia was struck by the moth’s drab garb). All we need to say is modesta when we talk about this genus of moth to other people—all over the world.

Even scientists use different colloquial names for animals. A brown and yellow butterfly with blue “eyes” on its front wings is called the common wood nymph, or the wood satyr. Other lepidopterists named the wood satyr the blue-eyed grayling, others, the goggle eye. Who is right? The correct name, the binomial, is Cercyonis pegala, and that is the only name that correctly identifies this butterfly everywhere, to everyone. Also, anyone discussing the Satyridae family of butterflies will know that just plain pegala designates the goggle eye the wood satyr, the blue-eyed grayling, the wood nymph.

What happens when the American Museum of Natural History wants to talk to entomologists in Europe about a butterfly we call the mourning cloak? In Germany it is called der Trauermantel; in France it is le morio (‘the moor’); the English named it the Camberwell beauty. What butterfly are they talking about? They are referring to Nymphalis antiopa, and this binomial jumps all geographical boundaries, crosses through every language, through all the alphabets, and determines this animal’s true identity.

We may not know how to read or write the letters and symbols in Japanese, Chinese, Arabian, or other languages, but we do not have to when we refer to living things, because the generic name and specific name, in Latin, are the same all over the world.

A species of tick, the animal that Pliny the Elder called “one of the foulest and nastiest creatures that be” should be known to most residents of the northeast coast of the US, because Ixodes dammini, the deer tick, is the vector for another dreadful animal—the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes borreliosis Lyme (disease)—the fastest-growing infectious disease in the US after AIDS.

Perhaps a good start for Cynthia’s further exploration of the animal kingdom would be with dinosaurs, cats, and dogs. Young people probably know more than most adults about the huge lizards (sauri) that roamed this planet a hundred million years ago. One of these dinosaurs (‘frightful lizards’), Tyranno-saurus rex, is the ‘tyrant lizard,’ king of them all. And the cats: “Felix” (Felis catus), the tiger (Felis tigris), and Leo the lion (Felis leo). Canis lupus is the wolf. Another dog, domesticated, is bred in many varieties: Canis familiaris is a family-type canine. In order to distinguish him from other varieties of Canis familiaris I gave my dog an extra, varietal name: “Thunder.” I also, very unofficially, invented a joke binomial for him: Fido fidel. He is ‘faithful Fido.’

Occasionally, the colloquial name, by itself, adds to the information given in the binomial: the platypus (Ornithorhyncus anatinas) is a ‘(ducklike, bird-snouted) flatfoot.’ There is a lot of information in those three words.

The binomial for Cynthia and me is Homo sapiens. My varietal name is Douglas. Cynthia’s varietal is Cynthia, and it can be as long as Cynthia Elizabeth Smith-Jones. But the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (for binomials in the animal kingdom) does not accept Latin varietal names because it would create too much clutter. Our parents had to invent our varietal names in order to single us out, to call out to us. Other animals probably do the same, for each other and for their children. I feel sure that Thunder has his own names for his Canis familiaris friends, and imagined enemies.

Although we can sometimes take the shortcut to just the specific name, it is better to use both names at first mention, unless we are sure the people addressed know what genus we are talking about, because many of the same specific names are used in other genera. Also, since most specific names contain words that are more descriptive than those used in the names of the various general—like the Latin words for modest, beautiful, amiable, and magnificent, for example—there are not enough to go around, not just for other genera, but for the millions of other living things in all the tribes, families, orders, and classes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Our own, specific, descriptive name, sapiens, comes from the Latin word to ‘know.’ We are supposedly more knowing and wiser than other (lower?) animals. About a dozen other animals bear this same specific name. Our generic name, Homo, is akin to another Latin name, humanus ‘human’ and to humus ‘earth.’

“All living things” includes, of course, the vegetable kingdom. All plants, from seaweeds to orchids, follow the rules of binomial nomenclature. Some of the most interesting names, and flowers, in the vegetable kingdom are found, fittingly, in the Orchidaceae family. Phalaenopsis amabilis, the lovable moth-resembling orchid, or Trichocentrum orthoplectron, the hairy-spurred cock’s spur orchid (another binomial that tries to say it twice).

Dear Cynthia,

I hope that when you get to high school you will impress your biology teacher with modesta, and that your animal friends, for all your life, will be “fidel,” domesticus, amabilis, agilis, and magnificens, even sempervirens, but not too vociferus, tristis, nor neglecta.

You may never see the beautiful animal that flies through the night while you dream sweet dreams, but your namesake, the moth Samia, cynthia surely hovers out there in the dark watching over you.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors

P.R. Wilkinson, (Routledge, 1992), xiii + 776 pp.

Works of this kind are more often the products of individuals, in the great tradition of Johnson, Brewer, Skeat, Burger, and other—mostly earlier— writers, than of teams of researchers and editors. Wilkinson, identified as having studied Classics, Old English, and Old Norse at Cambridge, worked as a Forestry Commission woodman, an occupation that evidently afforded him the time and solitude required to concentrate on compiling and writing such a work, though no indication is given of how long he took to complete it.

The main part of the book, arranged under rather odd categories, covers 486 pages; it is followed by an 11-page Index of Themes (which might have been made more accessible if placed at the front); the rest consists of an Index of Keywords, “some 40,000” according to the blurb. Covered in the text are “over 20,000 English sayings.”

Although many articles, theoretical essays, and books have been written about metaphors, little effort has been made to investigate them systematically: as all of language is itself a metaphor (unless one believes in logomancy), one is continually confronted in the compilation of an ordinary dictionary with examples of semantic and linguistic changes (as well as amelioration, pejoration, etc.) that are tantamount to shifts of meaning that, loosely, could be said to be metaphoric. So it remains to see just which 20,000 “sayings” Wilkinson has chosen to analyze and record. With few exceptions, they appear to be phrases (bridging loan, wide open, Hyde Park railings), adages or proverbs (Don’t be after breaking your shin on a stool that is not in your way, When the wheat lies long in bed, it rises with a heavy head, The water that comes from the same spring cannot be both fresh and salt, Better feed five drones than starve one bee), and, occasionally, individual words (beeswax ‘business,’ grape-vine, stagnant). Many of the last are likely to be found in dictionaries, but modern dictionaries do not offer such useful treatment, which essentially links to a word or phrase the culture of the people who use it.

It would be grossly unfair to continue without quoting the author’s purpose, set forth in an Introduction, which is all too brief considering the complexity of the subject. Here are some relevant extracts:

In everyday life, metaphors take many different forms, including similes (a nose as red as a cherry), proverbs (don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched), transfer phrases (make heavy weather of…) [,] wellerisms (everyone to his taste, as they said when the old woman kissed the cow), metonymy (the knife for surgery, the crown for royalty), synecdoches (sixty head of cattle, a cut-throat), and swearing (‘bloody bugger!')…

Particularly interesting are the kinds of metaphor excluded:

As the main purpose of this collection is to trace the origins of folk metaphor in English, nearly all examples of metonymy, synecdoche and swearing have been omitted as being too marginal or personal…

Metaphor is often used to warn or conceal from a third party, as in your barn door’s open. In this category are all euphemisms, but they contain the seeds of their own decay. Many good metaphors have therefore been excluded because of this inevitable ephemerality. There are also two large groups which are not admissible as metaphors because they derive arbitrarily from sound-similarities without the necessary sense-relationship. These are based on puns like camp as a row of tents, and on rhymes—plates of meat etc. Occasionally, rhyme and reason happily coincide, as in skin-and-blister = sister, but for true metaphors there must be some sense connexion, otherwise the substitute word or phrase is merely used randomly, or like a secret code.

Another group of metaphors excluded is the names of natural species such as footman and emperor moths, lady’s slipper, shepherd’s purse, porpoise, etc.

…

Purely literary metaphors have been excluded, except for those which have become traditional by general acceptance, as have many Shakespearean sayings as well as titles and phrases from modern authors.

The result is, in large measure, a catalogue of the treatment once given in those older dictionaries that might, in an entry for kink, have defined it as a condition of a piece of wire then continued with, “hence, kinky twisted, abnormal, perverted.” Wilkinson’s entry for kink (under theme A3a Metal, different metals) is as follows:

Kink Aberration, abnormality (as when straight wire or metal gets kinked. Hence kinky = perverted, eccentric to the point of abnormality.

(Two matters of style should be noted here: first, all entries are capitalized, which I find off-putting; second, runover lines are indented, necessary in a dictionary but not in a work consisting of such short entries, with a resultant waste of space.)

The thematic categories, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR, RICHMAN, POORMAN, BEGGARMAN, THIEF, with AT HOME, AT SCHOOL, and AT PLAY added to allow for entries not otherwise classifiable, I find a bit too whimsical, especially when one finds Farmers, Farm Animals, and associated subcategories listed under RICHMAN, while those who tend them appear under POORMAN; the impression is that the author is subtly trying to pass on some sort of cynical message. Also, it is important to note that the categories describe the literal content of the metaphor, not the metaphoric aspect. Thus, kick the bucket is listed in the category E29e Pork (because of its presumed etymology, “Slaughtered pigs are hung by the heels from the ‘bucket’ or beam”) while go west appears under G12e Sunset, bite the dust (questionably defined as “brought low”) appears at C10f Winning and losing the battle, buy the farm (which I cannot find in the OED) is listed under E7a Land (where it is labeled as an Americanism, confuting my understanding that it originated with the R.A.F., early in WWII), and cash in your chips/ checks goes under K77c Roulette (which might be all right for a British English classification, but I think that Americans would expect to find it at K81 Poker). Although the Index lists most expressions at least twice (kick the bucket is under both kick and bucket, which is fine), it seems that no expression appears more than once in the main section notwithstanding any ambiguity or polysemy that might it might reflect.

Metaphors are the shibboleths of language and culture, and proper imaginative, apt control of them is an indicator of one’s knowledge of both. Within a language, they can be culture-specific or cross-cultural, dialect-specific or cross-dialectal. kick the bucket ‘die,’ for example, is probably known in all dialects of English; kick into touch ‘curtail or postpone further treatment’ is unknown except to those familiar with British idiom. This seems an appropriate place to describe a personal experience that took place in 1970, when I was far less conversant with British idiom than today (though I hasten to point out that it is unlikely that one can ever become fully bi-dialectal any more that one can become perfectly bilingual).

The setting was a conference room at the offices of William Collins Sons (since renamed Collins Publishers), in St James’s Place, an engaging set of creaky buildings situated between the Stafford Hotel, where we often repaired for dinner after our lucubrations, and Duke’s. Sir William and Lady Collins lived in a suite at the top. At the corner of St James’s Place and St James’s Street was the map store owned by Sir Francis Chichester, of single-handed sailing fame; across St Jame’s Street was— still is—Boodle’s, a club for the gentry; round the corner was the famous French restaurant, Prunelle’s.

It was a time when those attending the meetings, chiefly Jan Collins, who was managing director, the company’s attorney, and I were trying to arrive at a viable budget for the preparation and publication of what was to become the Collins English Dictionary. Various other people drifted in and out of those meetings, which were held sporadically over the course of several months, but we three were the chief punters (as they say in Britain). The discussions often went on for hours, all afternoon and well on into the evening. Though hardier in those days, my constitution was somewhat affected by jet lag, as I had usually arrived only that morning or the day before from the U.S. On one occasion, as our deliberations were drawing to a close after many months, we came to a particularly niggling point of dispute regarding the cost of some phase of the project—I have forgotten which—and, in frustration and exasperation, I burst out with, “You must realize that if you want to earn a penny, you’ve got to spend a penny!,” whereupon, much to my consternation, all those present fell about laughing merrily. [Note to non-British readers: spend a penny is a British idiom meaning ‘go to the lavatory,’ obviously a reference to the ubiquity of pay toilets.]

Despite his protest to the contrary, Wilkinson has included a number of what can only be termed literary metaphors in sections under Myth that include Primeval, Jewish, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic, but no Roman. The coverage is uneven: sop to Cerberus is in, but not Pegasus (even though it is not couched in a metaphoric phrase that I can think of). In the category of proper names, which are not specifically excluded in the Introduction, Brillat-Savarin and Escoffier are missing as metaphors for ‘great chef’ as is Einstein for ‘genius.’ One of my personal favorites in this category is mithridatism ‘the gradual immunization of a person against a poison by administering it over a long period in small, but increasing dosages’; it refers to Mithridates IV “the Great” of Pontus (? 133-65 BC), who, according to Justinian, foiled a conspiracy by just such a method before dispatching the conspirators one day at dinner by dosing the food with poison that had no effect on him. Nouns and verbs are the mainstay of the metaphors treated, but adjectives are in very short supply. One could write a longish essay on the allusions conjured up by the words Dickensian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian, yet none of these (among thousands of others) are represented.

I see that I have fallen (not inadvertently, I fear) into the trap that I so often criticize in other reviewers, namely, scoring a work for what it does not contain instead of sticking to commenting on what is there. Despite some disappointments, inevitable in any book (even those one has written himself) but especially in one that by its very nature could never approach completeness, it must be said that what is included is well and concisely handled, useful, and interesting. Still, I return to my point regarding certain omissions, for the purpose of a reference book is not solely to serve those who wish to look up metaphors they hear, but ones they read, as well. Focusing on the “living language” alone (according to the blurb) is a bit of a conceit, for what people are saying in Montgomeryshire, Northumberland, and Pennsylvania, even if it accurately represented, is scarcely the “living language” for most English speakers. It must be said that the days when every schoolchild was (at least) exposed to classical mythology and the Great Books have been superseded by an obsession with education applicable only to commercial pursuits, the syndrome reflected in, “Why do I have to study Chaucer and Shakespeare to become a car mechanic or an astronaut?” The liberal arts need not be regarded as ends in themselves—that is, to produce artists, writers, and other practitioners—but to create well-rounded human beings who are passing familiar, if only subconsciously, with the underpinnings of their society based on the bedrock of their culture. Of course, if by culture we mean today familiarity with the names of the top ten rock hits and the details of latest episode of Neighbours, Roseanne, or Coronation Street, then n one of this is important. At worst, modern education ignores totally the whole person; at best, it pays his tutelage mere lip service.

Some readers may know of my involvement with a related work, Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary [with Frederick G. Ruffner, Gale Research Company, 1982, 1986], an attempt to provide a quick reference guide to what can be termed metaphors, consedering the present context. Each entry in that book was accompanied by a source reference, more than a thousand of which were listed in the Bibliography preceding the Index. I miss such documentation in Wilkinson’s book: the only indication we have, from How to use the book, is in a vague mention of “Heywood, Ray, OED, ODEP, Apperson, and Skeat’s 1895 edition of Chaucer”—vague because the average user of this book may not be familiar with these cryptic references, and no bibliographic details are provided. There are no references to sources in the text at all. For the casual user, they might not be important, but their absence makes the book virtually useless for the serious researcher. Moreover, I, for one, should like to know the source that pins down to California the expression so low he could sit on a cigarette paper and hand his feet over the edge: given no gloss, does this refer to low ‘depressed,’ low ‘degraded,’ or low ‘abject’? Who is it that has attributed to America the Pepysian He cannot ‘whip a cat but I must beat the tail of it’? On what authority does Wilkinson accept that in Pimlico order is used in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut? It is possibly because of my predominantly urban upbringing in America that I have never heard that or several other expressions, similarly attributed, having to do with persimmons (which were always something of a joke, in any event). Spill the beans is in wide use in Britain and should not be labeled American: the OED shows it as “orig. U.S.” Lollipop lady/man ‘school crossing guard,’ on the other hand, carries no label at all, which one takes to mean it is universal, but it is virtually unknown in America. On the other hand, returning to omissions. I should have expected to find born on the wrong side of the blanket and fiddler’s green, among others. To the best of my knowledge, the American expression is come up smelling like a rose ‘survive an ordeal untainted or even in enhanced condition’; Wilkinson has smell like a rose [Amer] be pure and innocent. (Why is “CB Confined to Barracks” listed among the Abbreviations in the forematter? Surely it cannot appear as a label, since the phrase, which is literal, hence not an entry, is a description of a military punishment. Perhaps the author is testing to see if we are alert.)

Such are the problems with a new work, and they might be corrected and improved in later editions, for which one profoundly hopes there proves just reason. One is bound to wonder, For whom is the book intended? At the price, it is clearly not to be found in the book rack at the airport, and one must conclude that libraries are the likely target. These days, some might have the resources to pay that much for such a book, but I daresay there are not many, and at that price one would expect a cloth binding rather than the hard paper binding provided.

Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Executives and staff worker embracing Diamond Jubilee at last (10)

6. Grass surrounds little garden area (4)

10. Upside-down e was scrawled around church (5) there’s a fortune in them (3,6)

12. Hot movie director’s arro- gance (7)

13. Provided Peruvian natives with energy (2,4)

15. Umbrella originally in the air, tipping over (8)

17. Swallow roamed around, cir- cling university (6)

19. Try casual shirts and suit (6)

21. False alarm and vital non- sense (8)

24. Musical composition used in songs on a tape (6)

25. Leading horse, I’d returned to read casually (3,4)

28. Accommodating one apart- ment counter next to piece of furniture (9)

29. End of hymn captivates 500 jingle writers (5)

30. In Russia, no oppression’s ending at this time (4)

31. Pushes around resort city’s religious women (10)

Down

1. Had the wrong idea, even in fog (10) The man filling coffee dispenser upset Indian leader (5)

3. Leave a man gripped by urge (2-5)

4. Developing city in Italy covered by periodical (8)

5. Maniac initially swallowing vitamin (6)

7. Cattle whip around dress cir- cle (9)

8. Set up time trial (4)

9. Make safe and secure, strangely (6)

14. Stranger urged on shy dogs (10)

16. Bundle up to make speech complete (9)

18. Beach covering that is to leave California city (3,5)

20. I must break in to begin up- coming features (6)

22. Quiet gorilla eating vegetables (7)

23. High leafy bower, a place of refuge (6)

26. Identifies supplies in a mess (5)

27. Father in agony (4)

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“For gift delivery anywhere call 800-CHEER-UP (except where prohibited by law).” [From an advertisement for Grand Marnier, FMR, Chistmas 1985, back cover.]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. L.A. (R)GHETTO.

6. WELS-H(rev.).

9. T-R-AVAIL.

10. T(URNS) IN.

11. PAT(C) H-Y.

12. RE(BUTT)AL.

14. PAR (DON)ABLE.

15. TOD-O (dot rev.).

17. PU-P.S. (uprev.).

19. COUR(THOU)SE.

22. RE(COUPE)D.

23. ASK-ANT.

26. INS (P)ECT.

27. W-HITMAN.

28. TOO-T.S.

29. SET ON ED-GE (rev.).

Down

1. IT UP (anag.)

2. REAL-TOR (rot rev.).

3. HE-ATHROW.

4. TALE (hom.).

5. ON THE ALERT (hidden.).

6. WAR(MU)P.

7. LESOTH-O (hotels anag.).

8. H(ANG LO)OSE.

13. MAJ-O-RETTES (rev.).

14. PO(PART I)ST.

16. THE-SP(I)AN.

18. PICAS-SO.

20. U.N. ARMED (dream anag.).

21. D(U)RESS.

24. TENSE (2 meanings).

25. T-WIT.

Internet Archive copy of this issue

---

1. Quotations in the text will be found in The Australian National Dictionary, a dictionary of Australianisms on historical principles, ed. W.S. Ramson, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988. ↩︎